Pygmy Mammoths - Sept 7 2021

 

Pygmy Mammoths

Sept 7 2021

On the island

everything was small,

like free-flowing liquids

fitting whatever container

we find ourselves.

Dollhouse animals

and miniature plants.

Gangly birds

rendered flightless,

who are naive as puppies

when humans first come,

easy prey

for the rats that accompany us.

I think of Eden,

that archipelago of peace

where an unquestioning Adam and Eve

lived within their means.

Until they didn't, of course.

And of its primeval beauty;

a menagerie of fine jewel-like creatures

in a lush green garden

enclosed by the sea.

But we are not island animals.

We feel confined

consigned to a rock

inside a moat.

Too ambitious for small places

we yearn to stretch, stride, conquer.

We believe in growth, not limits,

size, instead of modesty.

But I think I'd prefer to live

on this small contained preserve

this island Shangri-La.

Among miniature mammoths

and shrunken lions,

pint-sized foxes

horses small as dogs.

Where I would be small, as well,

fitting-in so nicely

and walking lightly on this earth.

In today's Atlantic there was a fascinating story about the first people to arrive in the Americas, and elaborates on a theory that is gaining credibility: a coastal migration that occurred over 15,000 years ago. It begins on the Channel Islands off the coast of California, and ends in Chile. Here's the paragraph that spurred my imagination and led to this poem:

Several times along the way, we had to stop and wait for an island fox to cross. Small, silver-orange, and charismatic, the fox was miniaturized by the evolutionary pressures that shrink many animals on islands. Similar pressures resized a Columbian mammoth population that swam to the Channel Islands more than 150,000 years ago. The world’s only pygmy mammoths, they appear to have gone extinct around the time that humans first arrived on the islands.

I had trouble with the word “nicely”. I don't think I've ever allowed myself to use it in a poem before: too namby-pamby. But I think it works here. It falls on the ear just right. And in its unostentatious modesty, it seems to neatly embody the naivety and idealism of the writer.