In the natural history museum
my daughter wants to see the dodo first,
then the great auk,
then anything else
humans loved to death.
She walks ahead of me
with the speed of a tiny sloth.
Each plaque offers dates
like a wall casket.
Each glass case glows
with the muddy guilt of institutions.
Here is a bird we named
after its foolishness.
Here is a cat too beautiful
to be named after a colonized island.
Here are bones arranged
to suggest a miserable afterlife.
My daughter presses her hand
against the glass and asks
where the passenger pigeons went.
Everywhere, I almost say.
Into hats and homes,
into target practice,
into the long machinery
of war and peace. Instead, I tell her
sometimes people don’t understand
they are standing in the middle
of a miracle until all that’s left of
it is an afterthought.
In the gift shop she chooses
a plush dinosaur with furious eyes.
At lunch she feeds it half her sandwich.
Even extinction, apparently,
is no reason not to share
in her small undying world.
Walking home, she holds my hand
with such ordinary trust
I feel her whole tiny species
wobbling inside me.
SARP SOZDINLER has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, and HAD, among other journals. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region.
Beautiful work! Its rare to find a poem that is unencumbered with cynicism, confessional angst, or other negativity. This is just pure joy to read! Well done!