Lord of Life is read by Harry Owen with artworks by Sally Scott: video concept and edit by Roddy Fox.
Harry and I launched a poetry to imagery collaboration to take our work on to a virtual platform in response to the Covid-19 lockdown in South Africa. To our great surprise this piece won a Standard Bank Ovation Award for innovation and excellence on the Fringe at South Africa’s Virtual National Arts Festival.
Rhinos are certainly not the only African animals whose very existence is threatened by poaching and unregulated hunting. African elephants continue to be slaughtered for their ivory, much of which is in commercial demand abroad.
Here, in another fine poem from the rhino anthology, UK poet Alison Lock reminds us of our own responsibility to help preserve these fabulous creatures. ‘Don’t buy ivory!’ is the powerful and essential message.
The Trunk
She gave me a string
of rosebuds, cream,
scented with almonds
inherited from an uncle
who’d stalked
the plains of Africa.
Too heavy
for my sapling neck
they adorned my doll
Angelina, and when
the threading
cord had broken
I placed them in a trunk
where they lay
for years until the day
when a man on the TV
pointed to a carcass
captured, de-tusked
discarded by poachers.
Tipping over the trunk
I let the ivory beads run free.
Alison Lock
I have been quietly perusing again the wonderful poetry in For Rhino in a Shrinking World. I think I may share one or two poems from time to time. This one stays with me this evening: it tells its painful truths with an honest delicacy.
Vexed
It isn’t sexy, slaughtering the rhino.
Grinding the horn will not make you hard.
Softness does that. Whisper a sweet word.
The rest of you pretenders, oil execs, bankers, fiddlers
Bigots, control freaks, honkies; you happiness poachers,
Liars, pretenders – will you be roused?
Let the moose and the salmon and the rhino run wild.
Let bombs be knitted by old ladies and growing
Boys. Gouge the clay, pat it into usefulness. Leap from Mars
To Inisbofin. Paint your expression purple, your wagon yellow.
Grow a kumquat. Let the rhinos be too sexy for each other.
Let us see every big-footed wrinkle. Softly. Whisper.
Mary Mullen
Every two weeks the respected South African weekly newspaper Grocott’s Mail publishes a poetry column that I write. It is called Poetic Licence. Here is the latest:
Last weekend I listened to some truly outstanding people who are making a real difference. For this they rightly received Honorary Doctorates from Rhodes University.
It’s easy to forget, when the news is filled with stories of corruption, scandal, greed and crime that the world also contains individuals of exceptional talent and integrity.
Part of this week’s ghastly news was of renewed attacks upon local rhino. Two white rhinos were found dead and mutilated for their horns at Sibuya Game Reserve and another, which had been viciously disfigured and blinded, died shortly afterwards.
Then, near the Great Fish River, two black rhinos (only 5000 of which still exist) were found slaughtered – a mother and her calf. A third was gravely injured.
This is serious. Such gratuitous horror shames us all. We are overseeing the literal destruction of our world. And too many otherwise good people shrug, utter a platitude or two and assume there’s nothing to be done.
But the lesson of those receiving awards last week is that we can do something – indeed, that we must. Whether in promoting human rights or education, advancing social justice, aiding places devastated by war and natural disasters, or helping to preserve the natural world, if we do nothing we are complicit in our own ultimate ruin.
Three years ago, following the repulsive slaughter of rhinos at Kariega Game Reserve, the anthology For Rhino in a Shrinking World was published. Little enough, perhaps, but something to raise awareness and to support the heroic efforts of those on the front line of the fight to save these iconic creatures.
This poem – actually a song by American singer-songwriter David Mallett – was included. It’s about the importance of wild things everywhere and our relationship with them.
You Say That the Battle Is Over
You say that the battle is over
You say that the war is all done
Well go tell it to those with the wind in their nose
Who run from the sound of a gun.
And write it on the sides of the great whaling ships
Or on the ice flows where conscience is tossed
With the wild in their eyes
It is they who must die
And it’s we who must measure the loss.
You say that the battle is over
And finally the world is at peace
You mean no one is dying and mothers don’t weep
Or it’s not in the papers at least.
There are those who would deal in the dark side of life
There are those who would tear down the sun
And most men are ruthless but some men will weep
When the gifts we are given are gone.
Now the blame cannot fall on the heads of a few
It’s become such a part of the race
It’s eternally tragic that that which is magic
Be killed at the end of the glorious chase.
From young seals to great whales,
From waters to wood,
They will fall just like leaves in the wind.
But we’ve fur coats and perfumes and trophies on walls
What a hell of race to call men.
You say that the battle is over
You say that the war is all done
Well go tell it to those with the wind in their nose
Who run from the sound of a gun.
And write it on the sides of the great whaling ships
Or on the ice flows where conscience is tossed
With the wild in their eyes
It is they who must die
And it’s we who must measure the loss.
With the wild in their eyes
It is they who must die
And it’s we who must measure the loss.
(Music and words by David Mallet: Cherry Lane Music Pub. Co. Inc)
This is Thandi, the heroic rhino to whom For Rhino in a Shrinking World is dedicated. Her horn was, of course, hacked from her face by poachers.
Since then, I have had both the honour and the despair of watching a rhino darted and de-horned in order to make it less attractive to poachers. Here is my response to that experience.
I wish all rhinos long life, safety and the dignity of living as they are meant to: in the wild and free of human interference.
Chainsaw
I have always hated that sound: it means
death for something, it means devastation,
the hollow shriek of human intrusion.
Now here he is, crumpled on his haunches,
a white rhino bull, too strong, too proud, too
much himself, despite the darts, to go down.
But he’s drugged, masked, pinned: this to save his world.
And clearly he has been through the nightmare
before, though his stunted horn has re-grown.
Now the indignity repeats itself.
Our work’s against the clock, the sedative,
the history; his life depends on us.
So, plenty of cool water – and a chainsaw.
The helicopter’s pilot lounges, smoking,
in his cab as blizzards of horn shavings
surge from the blade like flakes of pale soap,
like the weeping wings of termites or ants,
like butterflies consecrating the grass
beneath the sun’s fire and the chainsaw’s hell.
This is what we’re reduced to: presiding
over the face of our world, cosmetic
surgery or death, improving nothing.
Harry Owen
VI
From fragments, horns, we dream of the unicorn,
fleet footed, ephemeral, fairest of all.
More beautiful still is the wholeness of things;
the slow rhino, pressing his feet into the earth
wirh every step.
VII
In the mud at the edge of the waterhole,
the earth and the water are one.
The earth and the water and the rhino
are one.
Species
Sometimes they rise before me in the night,
the lemurs, eyes as bare and bright as moons,
the lizard, older than the afternoon,
the coral’s tender hands which sun bleached white.
Some are immense, the tiger, shot and still,
some thumbnail-sized, like Chile’s emerald frog,
I never saw, and soon, nobody will.
Alison Brackenbury
Great video recording by Roar recordings: Harry reciting Eyona indala to eloquent visuals and music.
You might imagine that a limerick, with all its implications of light-hearted jokiness, would be the last kind of poem to find a place in a serious anthology such as this. But here Madeleine Begun Kane, whilst maintaining her limerick’s essential levity, cleverly manages to make an important ecological point at the same time. And that takes talent.
Limerick Ode to the Rhinoceros
The rhino appears prehistoric,
With a diet that’s vega-caloric.
It’s endangered, alas,
Laws to save it must pass.
This would make all its lovers euphoric.
Madeleine Begun Kane
(American humorist, political satirist and poet Madeleine Begun Kane – “Mad Kane” – won the 2008 Robert Benchley Society Humor Award and is a National Society of Newspaper Columnists award winner. She publishes the humor site MadKane.com – http://www.madkane.com – and her humor, essays, limericks and light verse have been published in numerous newspapers, print magazines, web sites, anthologies and college textbooks.)
Probably the shortest poem in For Rhino in a Shrinking World is also, in my view, one of the most telling. It manages to condense into a mere thirteen words a message of profound truth and power.
The poem is by the Australian poet Lorne Johnson and is called ‘Nexus’. Here it is:
Nexus
Look closely
at each
of your
fingernails.
They are
crafted
from
rhino horn.
(Lorne Johnson lives close to deep gullies filled with lyrebird song, in New South Wales, Australia. He teaches English in a Catholic secondary school in Sydney. Lorne’s poetry has appeared in various Australian journals.)
For Rhino in a Shrinking World 