National Zoo Keeper Week
Some appreciation for animals and those who care for them, with work by Graal Braun, Anne Frydman, Barbara DuCharme, Marie Ryan McMillan, and Joyce S. Brown.
TRANSCRIPT
We’re right in the middle of National Zoo Keeper Week. It runs this year from July 19th through the 25th. National Zoo Keeper Week was established in 2007 by the American Association of Zoo Keepers. That seems a bit self-serving, but hey… They say it highlights the tireless work, passion, and critical conservation efforts of animal care professionals. It promotes the idea that they do lots more than just feed animals; they are vital wildlife ambassadors and educators.
A lot of Passager writers are animal lovers or animal observers. On this episode of Burning Bright, some pieces about animals—not the dogs and cats and parakeets that we keep as pets, but other animals.
Graal Braun said his inspiration for “Domesticity Among Elephants” was a poem by D.H. Lawrence, “The Elephant Is Slow to Mate.” He said that based on a National Geographic account of elephants mating, he found Lawrence’s poem inaccurate and sentimental, so he wrote his own version.
The beasts were once monogamous,
but thrill slowly dwindled,
males gradually turning into
five-ton Don Josés –
puffing, red-eyed, frenzied,
legs like baggy pants,
bent to aim an oozing
two-foot phallus.
And surfeited or not,
loud and clumsy,
stumbling over calves,
trumpeting their maleness,
then rumbling off alone.
The cows endured,
confided in each other,
as cows will do,
and started sharing chores:
babysitting calves,
foraging together,
while the males, ignored,
blundered about the woods,
doing mostly the patently absurd.
And those who tried to return
faced only hostile trunks
instead of tempting tails,
must* not a must
from this time forward,
although…
the ladies held each year
an open house,
to let the oafs abide a week
for necessary seed.
From Passager’s 2011 Poetry Contest issue, Graal Braun’s poem “Domesticity Among Elephants.” Graal said his first name is a composite of his parents’ names, Grace and Albert.
The second elephantine poem is by Anne Frydman from her book The Three O’Clock Bird: “Elephants.”
I have always loved elephants
their high foreheads, low knees
trunks that can hang through tusks
or curl to drink
that they have only-‐children
who hold their mother’s tail
middle-‐aged shaped bodies
flat feet, sad eyes
and lashes like a father’s
short and straight
“Elephants,” Anne Frydman.
Next, two poems about moose. First, Barbara DuCharme’s “Socatean Poem.”
A young bull moose
drinks loud and long
at Socatean Stream.
In morning sun
he dips his muzzle
in fast running water.
He hears the plain clang
of aluminum boat
and geese honking.
Is this why
he lifts his head, turns and walks
to the woods?
He speaks the way
mountains have faces
in tones of flint and fir.
“Socatean Poem,” by Barbara DuCharme from Passager’s 2010 Poetry Contest issue.
And our second moose piece, “Moose” by Marie Ryan McMillan. She said she likes to write about women aging in and near the wilderness. She said, “How does our relationship with nature change as we get older? When your body isn’t 25 anymore, how do you move through wildness?” Here’s an excerpt.
The cabin shook. And then it shook again. Could ghosts actually move a place? Or had the warming bumped the cabin off its footing, the shift so abrupt as to be impossible to stay in place? She looked out the window and there next to the porch was a man. A huge man. She looked again. It wasn’t a man. It was a moose. A moose rubbing his rack on the deck’s post. The velvet peeled off his antlers in long bloody strips. He shook his head, and the deck vibrated again.
They’d seen moose around the cabin before, but they usually stayed their distance. At least she thought so. Anything could have happened in the year she’d been away. Maybe he’d decided to move in and she was the trespasser. For years Scott had insisted he would go moose hunting, fill up their freezer. “Can practically bag a big one right from the porch,” he told people. But in all the years he owned a rifle, as Alaskans did, he’d never once bought ammo. The yard moose had never been in any danger. But she didn’t like the idea of him on the deck or blocking her way to the car or generator.
She opened the door and yelled, “Hey, go on. Get out of here. Rub on some tree instead.” The moose looked at her and their eyes locked. Dark brown. Soft. Deep. She knew that even though moose looked like a cartoon of the stupidest possible animal, they could be dangerous, kicking the shit out of people who thought they were a joke. This moose was not going to kick her. Its stare told her that. It lacked fear, it lacked self-absorption. It said only: I am here. You are here. We are both here.
Marie Ryan McMillan’s piece “Moose,” from the Winter 2025 issue of Passager.
Similar to Graal Braun, Joyce S. Brown said that her inspiration for this next poem “Wild Life” also came from National Geographic.
Hyenas are among the least
attractive in all God’s court
of animals: misshapen as
the Hunchback of Notre Dame,
cacklers, cunning carnivores.
Yet, watching
a National Geographic film,
I am overcome with longing
when I see a mother licking
her single cub, the cub up on her
shoulder, her head turned to
reach him. He never moves
while she licks over his head,
down his back, over and over.
“He got a lickin’” means to us
a punishment not pleasure.
This natural lick is what I want,
and never got, and never gave.
Joyce S. Brown’s poem “Wild Life” from Passager’s 2022 Poetry Contest issue.
On this episode of Burning Bright, we’ve been celebrating National Zoo Keeper Week with five poems that only zookeepers should have as pets.
To subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com. Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.
For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Sarah, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
