Inviting Sir Dodo to the New Year’s Feast

Sir Dodo has been left out in the cold
for shameless years that I care not to count:
adorning displays in the Natural History Museum;
shafted, stuffed and shelved upon a mount:
Come in, Sir Dodo, come out of the cold,
the time of feasting is upon us, just
as once we feasted upon you
this table’s yours and you may feast on us.
We’ll sit him at the head of the high table,
plump up his feathers, place a shining crown
above his beak, and we’ll not speak a word,
but bow our heads in reverence, and wait
for his bird-voice to call us out, (to roast
us if you will,) and chuckle, one and all
until there comes his raucous cackle-cry:
‘Fools! Fools and dissemblers, every one!
I was a guinea-pig in your program,
of systematic extinction, but you
have made progress in this beyond your dreams
1/6, you say? 1/6 of all species?
I’m nothing special, then: But you? Just look
how proudly you surmount all creation
until a virus brings you to your knees
and you resemble my friend the ostrich
head in the sand, repeating your mantra:
“If we just close our eyes and count to ten
our problems will be gone by ’21

you’re fond and foolish, I, Lord of Misrule:
Crown this a glorious feast of earthly fools!’

© Experimentsinfiction 2020, All Rights Reserved

Written for Earthweal’s Weekly Challenge

In this week’s challenge, ‘A Feast of Earth Fools,’ Brendan has given us the following brief:

For this challenge, invite your dead to the feast. Stage your own masque. Appoint a Lord of Misrule—a climate migrant, say, one of society’s lowlies. Quest for a Green Chapel and exchange heads with a Green Knight. Visit Saturn (or Dionysos or Odin or Father Christmas) in his Otherworldly abode and describe the thing you have brought back — sword or cauldron, squashes from the garden of Priapus or fanny-pack of Aphrodite Kallipygos...

So transform! Mix your human essence with another living entity, be it frog or palm or eel: Sing as frog-man, palm-woman, eel-king. Bring an extinct species back for a seat at the banquet. Make them “thick” with life.

I have tried to do justice to this challenge by resurrecting the Dodo.

30 thoughts on “Inviting Sir Dodo to the New Year’s Feast

Add yours

  1. Oh my, Ingrid, you’ve risen to the challenge and given us the dodo, alive and well and kicking butt! Your list of three, ‘shafted, stuffed and shelved upon a mount’ is sibilant and spitting feathers, and it’s only fair:
    ‘as once we feasted upon you
    this table’s yours and you may feast on us’.
    And how true the lines:
    ‘…Just look
    how proudly you surmount all creation
    until a virus brings you to your knees
    and you resemble my friend the ostrich
    head in the sand…’

  2. Well, Sir Dodo seems to have found his way to the head of the table and has spoken the last word on the subject of a pandemic and human ostriches. Great story and response to the prompt, Ingrid.

  3. Well done! Thoughtful and funny–and yes our heads are in the sand.

    I sort of imagine this dinner with the dodo as a similar scene to Lewis Carroll’s Mad Tea Party. 😏

  4. Yep, Sir Dodo makes a find Lord of the misrule we have wrought! Bowing heads and reverence to let the Dodo speak was a find touch. I’ve heard it said when making amends the person asking for it should shut up and listen to all the aggrieved has to say. Well done – Brendan

  5. Oh yes, he speaks truth……..our magical thinking is catching up to us………when the seas rise to our nostrils, maybe then we’ll realize we are as much at risk of extinction as any other species. I love this poem!

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