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There will be no more loss in this world
SEBASTIAN KOGA
There will be no more loss in this world
From bones
beneath the permafrost
we will clone
the wooly mammoth.
The forest will shudder
with ancient memory—
a spring return of the mammoth
its mushroom legs finding balance
after millennia.
And we will also clone fish:
A shoal of lost salmon
will be cloned
from a son’s melancholy over
a season’s fishing with his father.
We will clone every living thing:
A kit of messenger pigeons
from a parcel of letters,
A squabble of seagulls
from a drift of broken masts,
An aerie of ravens
from a stand of worn quills.
And what else?
My war-time ancestor
from his one letter home,
A wedding from a cufflink,
A mother from a parasol,
A child from a cartwheel,
A camel from the absence
of a single drop of water.
And we will also clone pain
from a promise
and love from an emoji
and distance
from a landmine.
There will be no more loss
in this world
But the rain leaks through the cleft lip
of the sky,
And melting snow
uncovers seedpods
of many lives
which do not want
to be reborn.
Sebastian Koga is a Romanian neurosurgeon and medical researcher currently living in New Orleans. He holds Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. His writing is inspired by migration, displacement, proximity to illness and death, and the rapid ecological and technological changes of the Anthropocene. His poems appear in The Vanity Papers, Oxford Literary Review, The Poet’s House, Liminal Spaces, Wingless Dreamer, Poets Choice and Cathexis Northwest Press.