Poems by Dilantha Gunawardana

The Last Remaining Male Northern White Rhino*

by Dilantha Gunawardana

From Canary Fall 2018

Dilantha lives in the small island nation of Sri Lanka, called the pearl of the Indian Ocean, on the edge of a city, surrounded by squirrels, noisy crows and the occasional monkey, a place where nature is fast being engulfed by concrete but yet still harbors a species-rich biodiversity.

Someone enterprising, perhaps a zoologist,
once opened a Tinder account
for the last remaining Northern White Rhino male
in the wild, to trigger a hat collection,
to save the last of his species, from the jaws
of a cruel and callous extinction.

The last male Northern White Rhino
now passes his times in sparsely vegetated plots of land,
and water holes, dreaming of the day
he, the heart-throb of his dwindling kind,
will bring a little pocket rhino to this world.
How storybook it all looks in reproduction biology,
but sadly, a long shot in math.

The dirty work that a man has to do,
the bump and the grind, knowing his kind is depending on him.
The two-horned wonder, kissing from just beneath the hairy horn,
and making love with the other horn,
an endowment as too with other mammals,
making babies the old-fashioned way, answering the call of the wild.
The tragedy of being the last extant male of his species,
those plus-size unicorn wannabes, who grow up
to carry strands of hair as sword-like horns.

How a tinder date has so many possibilities:
perhaps a night time escapade,
when two rhinos queue, one after the other,
looking at the beautiful super moon, perched
over the savannah, letting nature work
out the magic and the math,
of what is likely to be the seminal work
of a perennially horny wonder.

*The last Male Northern White Rhino died in March, 2018.