"Song for the Woolly Mammoth" by Lauren Moseley

Beth Zaiken, New York State Museum

                    When glaciers trapped a third of Earth’s water and drained the Bering

                         Strait, humans
                     journeyed to this land where wind swept the steppes of snow, exposing

                         grass

                    that would be plucked by mammoth trunks and ground by washboard

                         teeth.
                    Up to thirteen feet, their tusks curved helically and would intertwine

                         if they went on

                    a little longer. The beasts’ dense hair—brown, blonde, or ginger—

                         swung like a skirt
                    about their flanks. I want to rest my head against that shaggy coat, to

                         crane

                    my ears, to be protected from the giant short-faced bear. I want to be
                    their baby, wrap my trunk around my mother’s, watch the wild horses of 

                         Beringia

                    canter across the steppes in tawny, fine-boned movements. The thick

                         fat
                    under my hair keeps me warm when the sun goes low, and I grow into

                    an eight-ton bull, pierce the ice with my tusks and drink from glacial

                         pools.
                    The wind is bitter, but my strongest features have grown bigger than

                         my father’s.

                    When summer comes I must find a mate, and it only takes a few tusk

                         locks to show
                    my strength. After our calf is born, I see upright creatures eyeing him

                         from the mesa.

                    I will fling them against the icy mountains. They wear our hair as if it

                         were
                    their skin. Still, I will live through many winters, through each warm

                         season’s

                    hardheaded matches. I know the range that slopes like the hump on

                         my back, sunsets
                    redder than the long-toothed cat’s gorging mouth, how musk oxen

                         form a wall of horns

                    and still fall prey to the blade thrown. I know how many herds have

                         fled, and the curves
                    of carcasses stripped to bone by men, wind, and time. I do not know

                         that I am gone.