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?

∞

From the Spring 1996 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 12, No. 2)

Text © 1996–2020 by Anita Barrows