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17th May, 2024

Friday Poem – ‘How Animals Grieve’ by Kathryn Bevis

Photo of an Orca poking its head above the waves against an orange sunset

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘How Animals Grieve’ by Kathryn Bevis from her collection The Butterfly House.

How Animals Grieve We Google it. Laid on our backs in bed together, cursed by our tired, three-pound brains, we search our phones’ blue light for wisdom, become voyeurs of YouTube clips on other creatures’ pain. For seventeen days, a mourning orca attends her daughter’s corpse. She sinks and hauls the weight of her as if to fetch the breath back, have her suckle once again. A chimp will carry her lifeless son for months. She lets the troop draw close to hold her, hear her screech. They watch her comb the straw from listless fur and floss with grass between his teeth. Elephants know to sniff beloved bones. They seek to raise the fallen, rock their own bulk back and forth. Each one waits its turn to stroke and roll the skull, slow blow through its trunk, take time to bury its dead. Like us, giraffes and housecats, dingoes, horses, dogs forget to forage, forgo sex and sleep. Like us, at burial mounds, they pace and yowl and keen. So why should it surprise us, Ollie, — us who matter most to one another, us whose marriage is as deep as marrow — why is this loss unthinkable: me without you, you without me?

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Related Books

This cover shows a renaissance style painting of a woman looking at a butterfly perched on her finger. In place of a wig, her hair takes the shape of a human heart overlayed with tiny doors which attract a multitude of butterflies. The text reads: The Butterfly House, Kathryn Bevis.

The Butterfly House

Kathryn Bevis

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