Splendid Poison Frog
How can we bring back something
that is already extinct? How can we
return to any living being? Three things
even the mightiest hand cannot take back:
time, water, and extinct species.
Once a bright beast of desire, velvet
skin of venomous vermilion, eyes dark
spheres of sprinkled stars, this lost
amphibian of Panama, the only place
from which we can watch the sun
rise on the Pacific, set on the Atlantic.
Now the number of mature individuals
stands at zero, which is a round hole
the shape of its body. This is how
we own life: lick the bittersweet
poison still adrift between breath
and death, a splendid colour bleeding
into the diversity we chose not to hold.
Splendid Poison Frog (Oophaga Speciosa)
As an international poet with hundreds of poems published across six continents, I’m both cursed and blessed by the words; they mean the world to me. Take the word extinction, for instance, doesn’t it hurt your tongue, too? Feel how it clots at the root from the first syllable: x means dead. Then it knots with the second, sticking together right before the last syllable shoots from the teeth like venom. Ex-tinc-tion disappears in the bitter carbon of the air, leaving a crimson pang in the mouth. And if this is not fascinating, what is?
There is one more thing that captivates me almost as much as language: climate catastrophes. When I came across the OCS blog and the strong writing in it, I was already planning to write a series of extinction poems dedicated to the vanished beings of our age of interwoven catastrophes. I have named this era the Catastrocene, a later stage of the Anthropocene, borrowing the Greek prefix ‘kata’, meaning ‘down, against, back’. This term belongs to a new poetic approach I call Catapoetics, which views poetry as a wake-up call to this epoch of sixth mass extinction, shaped by the intertwined impacts of simultaneous catastrophes like climate crisis, immigration, scarcity, war, discrimination, etc.
Here is my first extinction poem: “Splendid Poison Frog”, dedicated to a dazzling crimson beauty declared extinct in 2020. Oophaga speciosa was endemic to the moist forests of Panama, a lush place between two oceans that, today, is missing a splendid colour.
Thanks for reading.
Özge Lena
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