Prayer Against Extinction
Holy
fits in the palm of a hand, the parula warbler’s
blue headdress, wild sunflower
breast, his song hosannah in the highest
through sweet gum trees
ocelot stalking soft
on holy spotted paws, reading
the gospels of pack rat tracks exploding desert moonlight
Holy
grizzly bear walking wide inside thick cinnamon fur, fur
that shifts like runoff river current as she lifts
her snout to a hunter’s breeze
Holy Holy, Holy
Siberian tiger, her shoulders like bunched boulders
rolling under her vanishing stripes, her song the tympanum
Taiga forest needs, takes only what she
and her scarce kits can eat
Holy Asian water buffalo and his patient wet slate back
ferrying farmers through marshy rice fields. Hear the suck
of his hooves.
Oh, elegant cloud leopard, lithe-ankled dancer balancing as she runs
up the hundred foot rainy trunk above the burning.
Orangutan
with his Li Po face, his generous Buddha mind, crafts
his own tools like raven, like crow, has no need for screens
Holy Holy
The shy steps of Key deer skirting drunken traffic roar, the zipstrip of tire skid
from Miami to Key West,
Everglades cougar, painter
whose green anemone eyes hold the history
of warm seas from which we crawled, half-formed to the half-formed we are
Holy
Holy
Holy
Wolverines, Northern Jaguars, Pygmy Owls, Honeybees, Gray Wolf and Red Wolf,
Leopard Frogs, Cheetahs, Green Sea Turtles, Ridleys, thousands and thousands
of miles of coral beings, Blue Whales, Vaquitas, Narwhals, Belugas, White Rhinoceros, Giraffes,
Elephants. Elephants. Elephants.
Old Growth Cedars, prairie grasses…
Pamela Uschuk’s joy includes birds, wolves, trees, and constellations. Translated into 13 languages, her Crazy Love won an American Book Award and Refugee was named by Orion one of top 14 poetry collections and Kirkus Review’s ten top books of 2023. Editor of Cutthroat and a Black Earth Institute Fellow, Pam is finishing a memoir, Hope’s Crazed Angels: An Odyssey Through the Whispering Disease.
Read poetry by Pamela Uschuk previously appearing in Terrain.org: Letter to America poem, “After the Election We Watch the Super Moon Rise over the Rincon Mountains,” “Focus of the Mind’s Labyrinth,” and three poems: “Mother’s Day Celebration,” “I Have an Illegal Alien in My Trunk,” and “A Short History of Falling.”
Header photo by SaveJungle, courtesy Shutterstock.
