Her name is Chang Champoo,
translated as ‘Elephant Pink.’
Met on the street in tourist Thailand.
9 years old.
6 months pregnant.
A beggar in an urban landscape.

Hungry,
grabbing sugar cane from my fingers.
Desperate for food.
Destined for an early grave.

“Where are you from?”
A question to her mahout,
in Thai hauled from fragments of memory.
“The border.”  
Seemingly obtuse but not really.
Only one nearby.
Burma.

Elephants,
born in captivity,
used in logging,
now unemployed.
Teak forests of old but a distant memory.

Did I only fuel her belly
buying over-priced sugar cane?
Or did I also fuel
rampant exploitation
of disadvantaged animals?

Not everything in life
Is black and white.
Sometimes it is grey,
This night it was Pink.
How could I refuse her sustenance
when confronted by those
mournful pachyderm eyes.

The question lingers…

I look up into the lilac sky
And you glide across like a floater in my eye

You are not to me the death dealing cross
Making other mammals freeze and suffer loss

I see you as a rare free soul
Defying the death dealing action that is Man’s role.

                              —————————

You dark flying scimitars with your piercing cry
Wheeling from your element, the stormy sky

With your shrill threats you dare to defy the stick swung with
all my might

Brushing my head and then returning like killer boomerangs
in flight.



                              —————————

With discriminating care you pluck those little fish you seek
With your long, curving, darting beak

If you are disturbed you rise without a cry
And flap away soundlessly into the protecting sky.


                              —————————

You are comic like this rhyme
Which I only pen because I have the time

You flew in with a squawking cackle
That sounded like a football rattle

You have only one objective, to eat your fill
By ravaging that tree with your outrageous bill

Its like a mango eating other fruit
Lychee, som-o, champoo, kanun, all will suit

You return a piercing stare with you target eye
And to the starer it magnifies.