Dodo

Hans Savery, painting of a dodo (1651)

A quarry takes a bite out of a hill;

Shot whale turns belly uppermost; fake star

Intones an orbit; chimney sirens cry:

Labour is holy! Profit is better than prayer!

Fish in fetid rivers die;

Dodo is dead.

—Jack Beeching

"So what?" they say. "We’ll bring back the dodo yet.

It’s just a trick with DNA.

We’ve almost revived the woolly mamoth,

Tasmanian tiger, and dire wolf.

We'll resurrect the dodo, too, one day.

You wanna bet?"

"What use?" you cry. "What earthly use!"

"I’ll tell you what! Dodo by and by

May serve as totem for our ingenious race

When we’ve all gone off to a better place:

Dodos aplenty Elon’ll have on Mars.

They’ll play around his feet beneath the stars."

Jack Beeching epigraph from Penguin Modern Poets 16 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1970). A fine historian and poet, Jack Beeching is, alas, all but forgotten today.

Sunday, May 11, 2025