'can you my woodpecker make remembrance of how I loved you'
Oh my darlin’
Poem by Dana Littlepage Smith
Witness this
my turgid blossom
pearl warbler
O my darlin’ witness
how we ache in ivory –
billed heart break
can you my woodpecker
make remembrance
of how I loved you
my southern acornshell
in that upland of existence
dreadful sorrow
wakes my little Mariana fruit bat
oh my darlin’ oh my darlin’
oh my darlin’
Mississippi flat pigtoe,
you are lost and gone for –
Eight birds and one flower
what can we say?
witness witness witness
my woodpecker gone
from Missouri to the Carolinas:
the last note of the ivory-billed
o my darlin’ untranslatable
may translate Scioto madtom
eviscerate dreadful sorrow
this ache I placed in Tennessee
where the warbler lies
the woodpecker blanked
from this ivory-billed wilderness
where until we – unless we
you are lost and gone forever
nothing
and no one shall wake
Dana says: ‘This poem is inspired by the Woodbrooke course “Voices of the Earth”, generously led by Zélie and Philip Gross. The USA has recently published a list of another twenty-three newly-extinct species, some of which are named above [including, pictured right, the ivory-billed woodpecker (courtesy National Geographic)]. Lines in italics are sung to the tune of “Clementine”.’
