John Anderson Poet Tanka

Notes About The Poem

95% of these Black Swans at Lake Wollumboola, NSW Australia will die due to Bird Virus H5N1.

A virus does something a genuinely inert object such as a grain of sand cannot do: its descendants vary, compete and evolve. Its genome can reproduce via the replication machinery of a host cell. It it cannot survive by itself. How can something that is not quite alive participate so successfully in life? What right does it have to exist?

Listen to poem:

Twitchers Counting Birds on Death Row

Counting birds at dawn
before the sickness arrives
numbers toll victims—
a ledger of feathers, wings
a census to count the loss.

After the virus
moves unseen through stricken flocks
silencing shorelines—
we count again what survived
absence, entered row by row.

Still some birds remain
carrying something unlearned
an old resistance—
their blood remembers a way
through their freak immunity.

So we count once more
not merely bodies and graves
but the remnant wings—
that become the vital seeds
for new flocks waiting to come.

What is a virus?
unable to live alone
it enters host's cells
steals their means to replicate—
using host's machinery.

A speck without life,
inanimate chemistry,
what right to exist?
no purpose, point, or reason—
a plague within the living.

Is a virus life?
no breath, hunger, cell, or pulse,
inert when alone
yet it mutates and evolves—
where does living, truly start?

I count the living,
knowing most are on death row,
I will count remnants,
I will watch the numbers grow,
mourning such senseless dying.

I count the living,
knowing most are on death row,
I will count remnants,
I will watch the numbers grow,
rueing utter senselessness.

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