Trumpeter (1990)
ISSN: 0832-6193
Suicide Note, California Condor
California Condor there is no place for us in a world like this. Soon we will be joining your ancestors and the world you have known for fifty million years and the world I have known for twenty will wipe us from its memory forever. But in these final moments as we wait to die, incredulous and defeated I will try for us both to remember our lives. Magnificent bird your vast obsolescence rode in from the lumbering Eocene already archaic when loping man was straining to rise from all fours. The death pangs of the dinosaurs meant nothing to you - the birth pangs of the molten continents too, within your vast embrace. In a changeless world where time was measured in millions of years you were perfect - in ponderous retreat from the slow encroachment of glaciers or the ponderous regaining of ground in the million year melt equally you thrived right on into history until the Spanish and the Yankees voices sounded in the sun-scoured canyon with the bullets and bulldozers poison and snares that are driving you into extinction. Now, as I sit and watch this terrible programme on TV there are twenty five California Condors alive on this planet and all of them held in a cage at the San Diego Zoo. This year is the first in fifth million in which a new California Condor has not been born to the world and the future of the species is vested in twenty five feeble vultures too old, confused and weary pampered by desperate people in a chicken wire hutch in the desert. They have come from perfection to obsolescence in a microsecond of their massive history. And here am I, writing poetry. It seems so little, so poor. And indeed I am defeated. I cannot bear to live in a murdering world whose only civilization is death whose only culture, destruction. And I cannot bear to live in a world without the California Condor torn down from the sun like a ripped banner a ragged black cross of its own unbearable absence wrenched from the heart of its soaring skies.
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