“Gorillas in zoos around the nation, particularly males and those in their 20s and 30s,
have been falling ill – and sometimes dying suddenly – from progressive heart ailments.”
(Associated Press, April 7, 2008)
So many have died.
The newspaper offers
a litany of names:
Mopie
Kuja
Pogo
Tumai
Akbar
Sam
Michael.
For their own good
they said.
To save them from lost habitat
they said.
To keep them from poachers
they said.
So that we might protect them
they said.
Heart muscle,
increasingly constrictive.
Halting lifeblood,
increasingly bound.
Over and over again,
pernicious pattern,
zoos all around.
So they invented a big name for it,
all latin cognate, scientific jargon:
fibrosing cardiomyopathy.
Pretense of tragic disease.
Highfalutin, fancy-ass, gibberish.
Who’s kidding who?
We don’t need a poet
working wonders of metaphor
to see that this is nothing but
murder by broken heart.
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1 comment:
The poem is right, although it's still probably better than being murdered so that one's hands can be made into ash trays. Perhaps zoos aren't inherently evil, but need to provide better habitats.
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