I wrote this in May last year, I was trying to find words to help me explain what the elephant thing is for me, so I could write about it in the catalog for Now She Remembers.

This one is one of my favourites. It says something of the level of personal significance elephants have started to have for me.




Last night I was tired, exhausted in fact.
I lay in bed crying, trying to find a way to feel right.
Mind full of worries, heart full of sorrows,
wading into that bitter cold lake called defeat.
Feeling the tugging currents of too hard, too complicated, at my feet.

Like a sleepwalker I woke slowly
Awake enough to see where I had wandered
I’d been there before. I knew the dangers.
Carefully I reached for things
To help me reclaim the shore

This time
I called my heavy sisters
My tusk and trunk best friends
I asked to borrow some strength please
Some of that massive, swaying power please
Just til I find my own

I started to feel it flow through me
Like a warm, dry, dusty desert breeze
It was good,
it was good and wholesome
But blood intervened

I saw then, in full colour
Bullet wounds and machete sliced skin
I saw flailing trunks and limbs
I heard the terrified trumpeting
And the thuds as they fell to earth
I felt the confusion, the grief, the horror.
Trapped, out witted, out manoeuvred
My sisters, my friends

No match for the human mind
No match for the human greed

With their knowledge and their greed
These tiny human creatures
Can and do and are…

…they are stronger than you

I crouched on the shores of defeat
I curled up in my bed
I cried and cried and cried and cried

Because the species that slaughters you
Is the same one that terrifies me.