Girl, you’re the last combination of chromosomes

and randomly smolt genes of your species.

You wear survival on your hide like an armour

of melted-down spearheads and machetes.

You vocalize the thunderous gutterals

of your indigenous tongue into seasons of hollow,

and are last to walk the way of the pilgrims

and mates to the familial watering holes.

Your brothers crossed the Ngorongoro cradle

to the other side to join the djinn. Their fathers,

and fathers before them, travelled past

the cauldron caldera you would call home,

if free to. Their pride graces teak tresors

as polished handles of yemenese daggers,

or ground to myth in Chinese powders.

But your grandfather,  as rare as rhodium

in his life, cleared the walls of hunting lodges,

reverse-engineering evolution

to a crash of poems. Like you, he was a birth

of magma from the fertile crater core.

Now receeding like lava back to the spirits,

he is a zip of unravelling DNA helix

and nucleotides you share, but have no use for.

As you search through cracks of crust and mantle

for the rest of your days, some holy place

to call your own, you lumber on a petered-out trail

of seed and sequence, relic and reason,

red dust. You are from yet also filled with volcano

and desire for something with no name, no outlet.

When the earth swallowed his last death trumpet,

deep underground an ancient herd stampeded.

Hearing it, he lowered his bullish head to charge

the rim. He knew he was storming time

to surrender to the last century of man.

You are so many things at once, a matriarch

without fold, an endling of magical code,

revered by the old ones, in lineage and bone.

And the horizon is a blood sky spilling towards

you. Fatu, you’re extinct despite still living

and we mourn the last ever male of your kind,

the northern white rhino, named Sudan,

who leaves you, granddaughter, behind him.