Cartographies

At the Kuwaiti Zoo

87 At the Kuwaiti Zoo Here lies a spectacle of gloom: all the empty cages smoldering, a stand of charcoal-blackened oaks fragmenting into ash. After the soldiers left, the charred meat went rancid. The keepers kept to themselves, barricaded in a basement. O gaunt and lovely gazelles with your jaws broken— terrible your stomping frenzy before your turn on the spit. O elegant elephant, your body once a shapely temple: now your trunk’s twisted off, your tusk’s a war memento. That day what piercing cries stupefied the uncaged sparrows pressed like cupped palms against shuddering branches; what ear-tormenting moans, bellows, barks, and whinnying sounded above the rat-a-tat-tat of round upon round of bullets. Only one uttered no sound as her knees buckled, and then, 88 like a collapsing tower, the giraffe crashed down upon her chin. Nearby, the monkeys screamed at men who saw them merely as automated, moving targets one might hit at a carnival. And before they fell, one by one, next door, the noble bison and mighty buffalo stampeded their own children. What a confusion of tongues arose on that hideous day— the amazed ostrich hissing, the black bear sobbing, the male camel gnashing his teeth, his mate wheezing deliriously as she fell to the flames, wherein her heart exploded. Even in this eerie stillness, those silenced howls hover above the feathered wreckage of slivered bone and peanut shells. And where sparrows huddled in the dark, now only shadows cringe, and in their beaks no straw, nor song, nor olive branch . . . ...