In Praise of Remembering

 

The Vaquita

We humans have perfected
the art of forgetting. We forgot
the woolly mammoth, and the sabre-toothed tiger,
barely registered the passing of
the Dodo and the Great Auk.

The Tasmanian tiger tiptoed quietly
out of our dreams, vanishing  silently,
the way the snow leopard
pads elusively the snowy peaks,
keeping safely hidden, and rarely seen.

Did you know the vaquita,
the most critically endangered
marine mammal in the world? There were
only a handful left when last
anyone looked, disappearing before
I even learned their name.

We have perfected the art of forgetting,
turning away from the uncomfortable,
retreating into our privilege,
the warmth of our houses, turning on
our technical distractions, so we
dont have to remember that,
in Madagascar, a million people
are eating cactus leaves to survive
because of drought and climate change.
We just don't want to know.
"Too painful," we shudder. "I just can't."

If we were to remember all the death
and destruction our species has caused,
even in just the last hundred years,
it might topple us out of our ivory towers.
(Plus - ivory. I could write a whole
other poem about that.)

A poet once wrote a poem in praise of forgetting,
but we humans are already too good at that.
What is hard is remembering -
the lost ones, the scorched earth,
the choking and turbulent sky,
the warming seas, the struggling creatures
on land and sea, eating their own version
of cactus leaves, as they silently grow thin
and fade away.

We humans are way too good at forgetting.
We could write a whole encyclopedia
with the names of the lost.

for my prompt at earthweal: The Great Forgetting

Inspired by the poem "In Praise of Forgetting" by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach