Each day, poachers kill 104 elephants for their ivory tusks. Over the past century, people have killed 95 percent of the world's elephant population. The rate of decimation increases as China's burgeoning middle class demands ivory carved into everything from chopsticks to tchotchkes. Experts predict wild elephant extinction in ten to twenty years.

I reviewed adewpearl's recent poem "Ten Elephants." I saddened to read the counting poem in which the number of elephants dwindled to one. I reflected on the massacre of elephants for their ivory. I thought, "Someone ought to write a poem about that!" A day later I wrote that poem.

I returned to the original 19th century nursery rhyme "Ten Little Indians" and the minstrel song "Ten Little N----rs" for inspiration to craft my poem. Those rhymes popularized a fun way for children to learn counting, but people now consider those rhymes racist and politically incorrect for celebrating the genocide of indigenous peoples and blacks. I recycled many of the same rhyming words and the genocidal nature of those rhymes and applied them to elephants.

My poem catalogues tactics poachers use to kill elephants for their tusks: guns (AK-47), theft from animal preserves and zoos, aerial attack, pits, poison-tipped spears, machetes, wire snarls, cyanide-spiked watermelons, and anti-tank mines. Like humans, elephants grieve. My last and final elephant dies of grief. I keep the ending of my poem in harmony with earlier counting rhymes which portray the last Native American or black person hanging himself out of loneliness.

I thank Brooke's "Ten Elephants" poem for inspiration to write mine.

I also thank drtruffle for the image "Mourning Mom."

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