Northern white rhino: Last male Sudan dies in
Kenya
BBC News 20 March 2018
Kin to the antic animal
grazing the eras of ochred lines
that roam spare grottoes, discreet
galleries, it speaks a language
guarded by gunmen—the last
of its kind in still reserve among
thickets of acacia trees. Dürer
dressed this exotic in swashbuckling
plates—a legendary likeness of Coliseum
combat. From our vantage of close-up
lenses, of flickering screens, this beast is
wide-muzzled, all bristly hide, gaze trained
low on grassland to roam by day and
up to half the night. Another click offers
up a cache of tagged, poached horn—
hoarded for elixirs and curatives—
a planet’s digitized requiem. O wallower,
pale warship in silty waterholes,
linger a while beneath Kilimanjaro’s
visible enchantment of snow, O face
caught in the crosshairs of going & gone.
READ MORE
Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhino, dies – video report [The Guardian]
He Died on His Horn [Poets Reading the News]
Jane Satterfield is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the recipient of awards in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bellingham Review, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Mslexia, and more. Her books are Her Familiars, Assignation at Vanishing Point, Shepherdess with an Automatic, and Apocalypse Mix, winner of the 2016 Autumn House Poetry Prize, as well as Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore.
Image of “The Rhinocerous” by Albrecht Dürer.
