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In the February 1994 issue of National Geographic, an article spoke of a tribe in Papua, New Guinea, which had given up its rights to its native rain forest and was forced to move to a group of villages where the members were exposed to diseases like typhus, malaria and whooping cough. Of twenty-three children born in one village in eight years, none survived. The cassowary is a bird native to the rainforest whose sustenance is disappearing.
Heanbu Nullowoh, what now?
The giant flightless bird
whose head is crowned with a bony casque
whose legs are sinewy as the vines
of the liana, each one adorned
with a single treacherous claw —
the bird whose wingfeathers flare out from a shaft of horny spines —
cries in its flaming voice
across the broad leaves, the drenched tangled forest floor
where Henabu rocks her infant daughter on her shoulder
Henabu, is your baby dying?
Henabu, is your baby dying?
Her coughing is like a dog’s, her tiny ribcage
quivers like the arteries of a leaf in heavy rain. She is dying
with eyes shut, hands clenched, flowers
that never opened to daylight. All your milk
Henabu all your milk
Henabu all your milk
has trickled into the mouth of death.
They say the cassowary disembowels humans, but you, Henabu,
with your own eyes have never seen this. Sometimes at dawn
or at the end of day you may have seen from some distance
one of them peacefully plucking berries or insects
with its spearlike beak, then skulking away,
wanting to avoid you as you wanted to avoid it.
At times one or two appeared graceful
to you, even beautiful, the hesitant beauty
that comes from longing. What’s most strange
is how small their wings are, as though they weren’t meant
to be birds at all, but were trapped from the beginning
in these heavy bodies nothing would ever have been able to lift.
Perhaps what’s bird in them has only to do
with this yearning for what they’re not, which is a reason
you fear them, imagining what might one day
burst forth with the terrible absoluteness of need
through the armoured crest, the hidden
disproportionate vestigial wingbone.
Eight years
Twentythree children born in the village
Twentytwo dead & Henabu’s dying
Whooping cough pneumonia malaria
typhus malaria diarrhea: The price
of being driven from the forest to this place
beside this river There are new ways
we can learn to go on with our lives
but there is a cost
And wasn’t it hunger that drove us? the trees felled,
the government smoothtalking us
about profit expansion regeneration —
And wasn’t it wanting to live that drove us?
How many miles did it drive us? We
who never used to count anything, we
who had no use for numbers, we who let ourselves be named
by those who attempted to speak for us:
Twentythree children born. Twentytwo dead
& Henabu’s dying. For eight years no baby
surviving. This means — doesn’t
it? — no children
younger than eight in the village. No small hand
reaching, no small foot walking. Twentytwo dead
& Henabu’s dying. And doesn’t their crying
grow harder to hear with each one added? How can we keep
from losing count, how can we listen
to what they still might ask
from us, how can we walk
one single step further carrying their weight,
they who when we could hold them weighed practically nothing?
Is the first use for counting
to number your losses?
What now, Henabu Nullowoh? What
use? Is it one
bird who shrieks, or many? One
child, one breath-spasm, one set of fingers
curling around your own? Rain
makes rivulets down the veins
of the toughskinned leaves, ridges the forest floor
with a sound like grieving; but isn’t everything
grieving? What use
for counting? Into the forest’s core
plunges the cassowary, holding
in her beak one hem
of the sheet of darkness. You wake, reach
for something, take the other hem
intimately into your hand. You hold it
for her, she unfolds it
for you, over the graves
of twentythree children.
What use
for counting? What use
for naming? Doesn’t everything lost
have just one voice? What use
for crying, what use
will you find
for tenderness now, that rises in you
Henabu
like the ache of useless milk?
∞