three Resurrections
GOAT
On the 6th of January, in the year 2000,
a goat, perhaps not the greatest goat of all
time but, nevertheless, the last of her
species, a bucardo, passed away when
a tree fell on her in the Spanish Pyrenees.
Luckily, or unluckily, as it turned out
for her, a team of scientists, perhaps
an early version of The Resurrectionists,
had already taken samples of her DNA,
and set about trying to bring her back
from the dead. In the end, they did manage
to do what it was that they set out to do,
if only for a few minutes. There was
something wrong with the newborn kid’s
deformed lungs and, after ten minutes
or so, the bucardo was extinct, again.
Dire Wolf
My ancestral DNA was extracted from the marrow
of a thigh bone from a Grey found in a cave in Spain.
More was taken from the veins of one of the few living
Timbers trying to remain hidden in the dwindling forests
of Wisconsin. Both strains were then implanted into
the womb of an Arctic housed in a zoo in Tucson, Arizona.
The first attempts came to nothing. Well, not nothing, a couple
of miscarriages suffered by the reluctant host. Third time
lucky, a cub was born, and one that managed to survive.
The Resurrectionists fastened a collar round his neck so that
they could monitor his movements, which they did, until he was
twelve, when he died, a relatively good innings for a wolf in the wild.
But it was the nature of his howls that sent a shiver
down The Resurrectionists’ spines. They had never, throughout
their entire lives, heard anything so mournful, so melancholic,
neither from a human, nor from a more-than-human kind.
Mammoth
I think, if I am not mistaken, that you took
a few strands, or is it spirals, of my DNA from
the tusk of a well-preserved corpse in the Siberian
Tundra. Then, you mixed them up, or is it
entangled them, with those of an Indian
elephant. Implanted in another elephant’s
womb, we both waited until it was time for me
to come. When I did, it was, to begin with,
nothing more or less than a miracle; a hirsute
female calf, the spitting image of those you had
seen daubed on the cave walls at Lascaux. In time,
unfortunately, my hair began to fall out –
too much elephant, I guess, and not enough
mammoth. In the end, I didn’t survive that long
and, anyway, by the time I was an adolescent, I was
already completely bald and totally grey.
gordon meade
Gordon Meade is a Scottish poet based in the East Neuk of Fife. He was the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Dundee.
He has published
twelve collections of poems, including most recently EX-Posed: Animal Elegies (Lantern Publishing and Media, New York, 2023).
The Resurrectionists, from which these three poems are taken, will be a collection of poems which will attempt to explore the ethical issues surrounding De-extinction from the perspective of a number of more-than-human animals
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