Baby Orangutan
Animal Rights Poetry By Lynne Goldsmith From All-Creatures.org

Who will make your nest tonight?

with leaf pillows, frond blanket up on branches,
your mother gone, the palm tree she was in
burned to the ground to make room for the next plantation
to be built for expanding biodiesel fuel over petroleum
in Malaysia and Indonesia, quests having already spread
widely to countries seeking oil commodity for its many uses.

Who will feed you ficus tomorrow or a bird egg or insects?

as you swing through canopy branches
in search of another to hold your hand.

You tasted honey, but that is gone
and poachers followed along with feud over land rights
as carbon got released from fires and trapped in soil

adding to desertification, continuous global threats warming.

You cannot seem to rest at the lying down of elephants,
the rhinoceros taken down by hunters, their bodies not moving
reminding you of your mother gone into flames with forest’s others.

One hundred and twelve thousand species gone extinct this year alone.

With the coming of the rains and deforestation, flooding will take you,
your clinging to anything to float you back to what you know,
to what you long for,

your mother in nearby tree preparing branches and then holding you,
now as memory only.

Almost one and a half acres gone in a mere twenty-five seconds
with land the size of four thousand football fields gone in every hour.
Where do you go now as you cry?

What can possibly soothe?

©Lynne Goldsmith, 2018

Image by Image by Clarence Alford from Pixabay