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So many species now extinct :-( -----Original Message----- From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Millicent Borges Accardi Sent: 23 August 2014 22:54 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: A long snap 100 Years After Her Death Extinction is not always The light of noon-day. A horizon filled once Inside a plastic form. Again a mourning dove, And a breast colored With air. Martha finds herself long into the next day. Feathered and mounted Like the heath hen. �and then the next, As if by an eclipse, she is at the center of things. Because behavior adores boys and men Who like to shoot. Human enemies They were, by 1890, Passenger pigeons had become less than a handful. Martha born in captivity, Amid a cause or a brief Dampened moment Against a dove. Once part of a great flock Now, with dead feathers of her own. Shuddering over Canada billions Once flew. from one edge Of sky to the other. From trees, their Glistening copper Breasts and wings. Gone from billions These handsome birds, Half her body reservoir, two thirds her mate. Their wings sweeping Over as if there never Was a son of God. The flight imprinting how we would, in 1860, in 1900, in 2014, soon treat pigeons as a faraway past. In her final days, Martha, her keepers roping off the cage to stop visitors from throwing sand to get her to move. Lady, learn to be. like the great auk, remember Martha is all there is And Martha lived alone. She resonates With the word, move. In the early afternoon Of September 1, 1914, She died. Never having lived in the wild, Not able to survive not so different from that immense flock of a heart beat of down, born into extinction, nursed by genetics and luck, Her sides of gray-blue Black, once more than 3.7 billion populated North America. Her body, now one Of the downcast, the last of her species. Our partial actions Crowded together Like trees born out of trees. She was packed in ice and shipped to the Smithsonian. Perhaps a new Martha might lead a life, Pigeons roosting in nests re-engineered, from a mix of objects to make her flight whole. She didn�t exist She lived right here, shot, netted and burned like sky to other sky. Something happened that is good like the end of the Carolina parakeet or the clearing of an Eastern forest. Martha, the elusive female, duller after her, The flight continued. The males without touch stood in line To greet the next passenger, Half the size a mourning Dove. The very last of her kind. The very last Martha. Her wings trembling, The world�s final passenger, through the night of avian obscurity. To hunt and kill for sport. In nature, she is not a lost Cause. Under glass on a plate She remains undiminished. A Martha without George. The very banks of her Flight obscured. Nests of passenger pigeons Were known to break tree Limbs. When they were still flying, when she was skinned, when men and boys shot pigeons for sport. http://www.MillicentBorgesAccardi.com Like my Facebook Page @TopangaHippie on Twitter �gua mole em pedra dura tanto d� at� que fura