“Into the White”
Photography / Source: Ami Vitale
FULL POEM
Into the White
Sudan, last male
Northern White Rhino
Too late to say goodbye
He‘s gone
Into the white
The pixels from that bitter moment
Captured forever in camera Mon Ami
Turned upside down in the back of the eye
Converted upright to remain forever in the mind
interpreted as loss, release the loss feelings
Proceed to the ducts at the surface of the eyes
Return as tears, can’t wash it away
Put the photo away or endlessly loop
But that day, and that moment
Must never be forgotten
Lest it lose its uniqueness
And become ubiquitous
Another species bites the dust
On the day of departure
Complications of old age set in
He was sent away instead of suffering
Peacefully into a dream, a sleep
From which there is no waking
Into the light where silence filled the space
Even as the echo of his last breath
Marked the end of his evolutionary line
Millions of years to get here only to end
The silence too unbearable
The finality not lost on his companions
And the painful silence was moved along
Too much to see here, too much to comprehend
Only by the soft sobs of his carers
As the line between existence and none
Appeared to be stepped over, now behind
And left Sudan on the other side
Some were determined not to lose
Not to go down without a response
Deployed Genetic science, perhaps a fail-safe
Perhaps a surrogate Southern White
Like some thick-skinned Female White Knight
Can gestate the first of a new line
Still a Northern White,
Whose mother wasn’t
Whose father was
The last of his kind
Sudan may yet live on in the genes
And that’s the best that any living thing
Is here for, and we can hope for
Continuity
Still one wonders
If ever comes the day
When the last one of us
Breathes our last
Through our own folly
Following the Northern White
Into oblivion
Would there be any
To cry for us
Or did we send them all
Before us
Into the White
A place where all colours disappear
Into nothingness, a blank white sheet
Now see this text…
Disappear