Here's what they look like:
This is the way synchronicity works in my life. Giraffes have been my favorite animal since I was very young. The Okapi is the only member of the giraffid family apart from the giraffe itself. Okapi were brought to the attention of the world outside of the rain forests of the Congo region by Sir Henry Morton Stanley (of Stanley and Livingston fame) at the tail end of the 19th century. Stanley was born in Wales.
When I learned about the okapi, it prompted the following poem (not yet a final draft, I don't think), which I'd read at the poetry brunch the other day:
Here’s the Thing
All the dark matter we cannot ken, or the notion
that the cosmos may be a sheen of bubble
or someone else’s dream, or that our sharpest senses are
flotsam
fifty leagues above the iceberg tip of what can be
perceived;
that our most grand endeavors (I mean Giza, the Great Wall, man
on the moon)
are no more than one ant carrying one seed husk one foot.
I am telling myself this while telling you –
not to alarm or enlighten but as comfort.
Take the okapi, for instance.
We didn’t know about them for the longest time.
But ignorance did not impact them all that much.
Okapi by the thousands were born, mated,
died the deaths of
grass-eating creatures
and it was all right. I’m trying to say
it’s all right. Our knowledge
of a thing neither prerequisite
nor responsibility. You, for example,
could be anywhere including dead
or wherever one goes after that
and until just now I have forgotten
to set that burden down.
