We'll do just two more.
This one, I'll try to raise the mood with a joke.
In the southeastern United States,
there are all these big cypress forests and swamp lands.
And for a long time, this was the habitat
of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
And there was some uncertainty about
whether the ivory-billed woodpecker was still alive
or whether it had gone extinct.
And so, in the 1930s, I believe Cornell University
took a whole bunch of equipment down and camped
in those woods for four to six weeks
to see if they could find any evidence
that the ivory-billed woodpecker was still alive.
And after all that time, they'd seen no sign
of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
And so, they packed up all their stuff.
And just as they were loading up the car,
an ivory-billed woodpecker flew down
and perched on somebody's shoulders.
And as I understand it, this happened a number of times
over the course over, like, 30-year cycles.
People would say, oh, they must be extinct now.
And then, they'd go and look around, then
find one or some sign that one was still alive.
I don't believe that that's the case anymore.
I think, recently, ivory-billed woodpecker was
declared officially extinct.
So its nickname is the Lord God bird,
and that's because it's a very big impressive-- it
was a very big, impressive bird with a big long beak,
very colorful head plumage, and it would fly at your head.
And people would be like, oh, Lord God.
So that's why I got that nickname.
This poem is called, "The Lord God
Bird, Campephilus Principalis."
Knock, knock on the cracked bark of the sweet gum,
and knock, knock in Echo through cypress' swamp sunk
to their bent knees.
The punchline is that there's no punch line, only silence,
closing like a cloud around the place, where from you thought
you heard me call.
You can yoo-hoo your heart out.
I will hidden hold my operatic plumage,
fold wings over my ivory and my wound red crown.
I will wind so tight myself in feather and fern
that you, who've tramped years through this tract
with your Kodaks, your boom mic, humming dumbly reel to reel
must take heavy up the bureaucratic pen
and scratch the fatal asterisk to my name.
Then, when you've closed your logbook
and loaded up your johnboat with all those unconsoling tools,
then will I swoop the Spanish moss.
My white wingtips aflash in the canopy like the world's
last morning and jaw my tinhorn squawk from trunk to trunk.
It's a trick I picked up from the grubs,
having the fat flow far beneath the bark.
For whose love my bill evolved its ivory curve,
my lash-flicking tongue, it's Barb.
If I made myself easy to be found, why would you look?