SEBASTIAN KOGA

There will be no more loss in this world

From bones
beneath the permafrost
we will clone
the wooly mammoth.

The forest will shudder
with ancient memory—
a spring return of the mammoth
its mushroom legs finding balance
            after millennia.

And we will also clone fish:

A shoal of lost salmon
            will be cloned
from a son’s melancholy over
a season’s fishing with his father.

We will clone every living thing:

A kit of messenger pigeons
            from a parcel of letters,
A squabble of seagulls
            from a drift of broken masts,
An aerie of ravens
            from a stand of worn quills.

And what else?

My war-time ancestor
            from his one letter home,
A wedding from a cufflink,
A mother from a parasol,
A child from a cartwheel,
A camel from the absence
            of a single drop of water.

And we will also clone pain
            from a promise
and love from an emoji
and distance    
            from a landmine.

There will be no more loss
            in this world

But the rain leaks through the cleft lip
            of the sky,
And melting snow
uncovers seedpods
of many lives
which do not want
            to be reborn.

Sebastian Koga is a Romanian neurosurgeon and medical researcher currently living in New Orleans. He holds Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. His writing is inspired by migration, displacement, proximity to illness and death, and the rapid ecological and technological changes of the Anthropocene. His poems appear in The Vanity Papers, Oxford Literary Review, The Poet’s House, Liminal Spaces, Wingless Dreamer, Poets Choice and Cathexis Northwest Press.