#518 - a categorical imperative

 

3.vi.21

518

2.151

a categorical imperative

 

what do the dodos say about extinction?

 

one might have phrased that ‘tell us’

because… well, I think you know why

they never interrupt

 

shall we speak then for the gone?

and who will own the silence?

 

in the victim corner

(where I paint myself)

and whose guilt’s at home?

 

we measure the years since something

a creature missed or one less tongue, say

progress!

 

dodos are sensitive

mustn’t say this that

never ‘dead as…’ for instance

 

there but for the graceless gods…

one says that, knowing what the dodo didn’t

 

I speak of the last as if they were one

and smooth pandanus shreds in of the dying nest

 

that’s far other empire

   and

here at the limits of my own language

… you might say back from the brinking

 

we’re not you know – ever

the people we were

 

it’s fled to be

or here all along

it’s back up by the bootstraps

otherwise sinking

 

how hard it is to think beyond the colours on the map

a little too easy to tell up a privilege

you could always come back on your shield

 

for this us, this we –

think of a continent, any continent

don’t say penguin, don’t tell me yet

I’m guessing, remember!

you have to imagine being anyone

 

under their veil of ignorance

do dodos think about coming back?

 

another world is singing

where we are less and they still are

 

where do duties begin?

could have sailed past that island

who said ‘must come ashore!’?

 

we each have one tale telling itself –

that’s your truth myth

it should be the name of a holiday

or a concentration camp

 

ask any hobbit (best of British there)

… your really successful genocide

would be the one we don’t know about

because no one was left to tell the tale

or crept into the camouflage

 

it’s ‘we, we, we’ all the way home –

my hunch is this happens a lot