Here we have our ancient edition.
This is Sappho, 630 BC.
"Evening star who gathers everything shining,
dawn scattered, you bring the sheep and the goats.
You bring the child back to its mother."
Now this one is Kay Ryan, and it's called "How Birds Sing."
Kay Ryan is our national Poet Laureate right now.
And she turned up by surprise at our celebration,
which was great.
This is the penguin house.
And this piece that I selected was before the March
of the Penguins.
I'll read it, and then I'll tell you a little story.
"The male penguin picks up a pebble in his bill,
waddles over to a bird standing alone
and solemnly lays it before it.
If the stranger receives the pebble with a deep bow,
then he has discovered his true mate."
That's David Attenborough's Life on Earth.
"This stone I set at your feet is my courtship gift to you
at white summer's end on Antarctica's icy shore.
Later, you lay your egg and ease it onto my feet.
You turn and walk away, black going into blackness."
I think the way that it coincided
with the March of the Penguins may
be why this has become this romantic destination
spot for lovers.
[LAUGHTER]
Actually, the scientist I work with,
Dan Wharton, who is just sublime,
he's just really wonderful to work with.
He did the Jon Stewart Show with this as his background,
talking about--
in conversation with someone who was objecting
to having penguins because they exhibited homosexual behavior.
And Dan is incredibly droll and handled it beautifully.
[LAUGHS]
But it's become a place where people go to propose.
[CHUCKLES] And I'll tell you, speaking of prose and memory,
if you were proposed to at this place,
it would be an indelible memory, not only the proposition,
but the fragrant--
[LAUGHTER]
--breezes wafting past your nose while you
were affirming the question.
This was another one.
And doing the research, I was really always
delighted to find, for instance, that the poet that I had chosen
had really done the serious work in service
to the natural world.
And so this was one that I chose the poem
and then started reading back.
And we choose hundreds if not thousands of poems.
And so then you come down to final decisions.
And when I read about his life, I knew that he had to be in.
This is Birago Diop.
He was a poet from Senegal, ambassador to Tunisia,
and he translated the tales of the Wolof people.
He was also a veterinarian.
And when he gave up his public service,
he went back to Senegal and built
an enormous veterinary hospital.
"Listen more often to things than to beings.
Hear the fire's voice.
Hear the voice of water.
Hear in the wind the sobbing of the trees.
It is the breath of the ancestors."
And here-- for the most part, Central Park, the zoo there,
is a diminutive zoo.
It's six acres.
It's a jewel box zoo.
The animals are all diminutive, except for the polar bears
and the sea lions--
seals.
So this is around the polar bear enclosure.
This is Edward Field's transcription from Rasmussen's
journals, "Magic Words."
"In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived
on Earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to,
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive and what people wanted to happen
could happen.
All you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this.
That's just the way it was."
And around that same enclosure, there's
a poet in Maine, Gary Lawless.
He runs a bookstore.
And he looks like someone who's just come out of the woods.
He has long hair, long beard.
And he came down from Maine to read in New York,
and he was so delighted.
What's great is for the poets to come and see
their work up in the installation with the animal.
So this is Gary Lawless.
And one of the things that I've discovered that I really
like about public installation is
to do these walking installations that can
be read backward and forward.
"Treat each bear as the last bear.
Each wolf as the last, each caribou.
Each track as the last track.
Gone spoor, gone scat.
There are no more deertrails, no more flyways.
Treat each animal as sacred, each minute our last.
Ghost hooves.
Ghost skulls.
Death rattles and dry bones.
Each bear walking alone in warm night air."