Jenny Ward Angyal

Dust to Dust

they gather
round the body 
of the matriarch . . .
stroke in silence 
the cooling flesh

I mean to write 
of the death of elephants . . .
but see instead 
my mother’s face
waxen and serene

I lay down my pen and idly trace the curve of an earring.  It’s made of woolly mammoth ivory dug from Alaskan permafrost and echoes the curve of a tusk thirteen feet long, from a beast that died 13,000 years ago.

There are plans afoot to resurrect the mammoth from traces of its DNA.  Huge herbivores trampling the tundra—so the theory goes—might keep the permafrost frozen, keep its vast stores of carbon in the ground.

The mammoth was most likely driven to extinction by human hunters,  yet remnants of the planet’s megafauna still live in Africa—the woolly mammoth’s kin. They live, at least, for another flicker of time. 

a clock ticks
on the pawnshop wall—
pieces
of the ivory chess set
               missing

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About the Author

Jenny Ward Angyal’s tanka have appeared widely in journals and in her collection, moonlight on water  (2016). She is tanka editor of Under the Basho.