1.
Golden Toad
High in paradise
Massing gold together
Heaven's mating orgy
2.
Diplodocus
It just goes to show
An abundance of plant makes
A diplodocus
--
3. Talking to the Dodo
I do know that you died, you and
all of your kind, a long time ago.
But I want to have this conversation
and the living don’t have the patience.
You know what it’s like to fall
into a lake of tears, to think you will
never reach dry land again, never
unruffle your bedraggled feathers.
My whole life has become a caucus race,
with no beginning and no end,
no rules, and no winners, only losers.
What I want to ask you, Dodo, is why
did you simply drop out of the story?
I’m afraid the same fate awaits me.
Granted you made a bit of a mark,
but it’s crumbling now, dust in the wind,
with all the other forgotten creatures
who didn’t give a thought to legacies
or heritage, or what people thought of them.
Who remembers your beautiful plumage now?
All we know is your extinction.
After all, you couldn’t even fly!
I’m not a flyer myself, the more I try
to take off into the blue empyrean,
the more I am grounded on this sad earth,
my colours fading, my voice moving
further off into the mute distance.
What undoes me is that when I am gone
no-one will rail against the unfairness
of it all, no-one will complain.
No-one will write me into a story,
even if only to drop me out of it again.
I won’t even be a wail on the wind.
Rosemary McLeish
4.
Thylacine (Tasmanian Wolf or tiger)
Tiger-wolf padding
Softly the fearful night paths
Yesterday’s terror
Ghostly exists now
In the vaults of old pictures
Catalogues of death
Silver Trout
(If the Silver Trout still lives, which is just possible, it will be in two small lakes which are the residue of the great NH Lake Hitchcock, which disappeared at the end of the last Ice Age.)
A ghost in ghost waters
In the depths of Lake Hitchcock
The Silver Trout dreams
6.
Argentavis Magnificens
Condor beauty ends forever,
Gleaming jewel wings
Soaring from cliffs of Andes,
Cleaning up from death.
Linda Haley
7.
Lystrosaurus
by
John Warren
Lystrosaurus was a mammal-like reptile that survived the great Permian extinction, the greatest
biological catastrophe of them all, when somewhere around 90% of all species became extinct. Not
only did Lystrosaurus survive, it thrived in the aftermath and continued on the path that led to
mammals
Whoa!
What was that?
A great outpouring of lava?
or
A change in the rivers?
or
All the oxygen was taken up by the rocks, turning them red?
or
A great collision of all the continents together?
Or?
So much empty space!
So many unfilled niches!
We can go forth and multiply
Thrive, and, perhaps, evolve?
8.
Auroch
Four hundred years back
In a deep Polish forest
The last great one died
For all our history
They had thundered through our dreams
Flickered on cave walls,
Their bones in temples
Palaces, even houses
The stuff of legends
Now descendant herds
Multiply to threatening size
Heat the very air
Time for more thunder
For stories to live again
For our blood to quicken
Sabre tooth Cat
Pterosaur
Vast leathery wings
That challenged Leonardo -
Sinew, skin and bone -
Evolving answers -
Hollow structures, skinny strength,
Canny reading air -
Quetzalcoatlus!
Greatest shadow cast from high -
Ranging majesty
