By mid-century there were two quaggas left,
And one of the two was male,
The cares of office weighed heavily on him.
When you are the only male of a species,
It is not easy to lead a normal sort of life.

The goats nibbled and belched in casual content;
They charged and skidded up and down their concrete mountain.
One might cut his throat on broken glass,
Another stray too near the tigers.
But they were zealous husbands; and the enclosure was always full,
Its rank air throbbing with ingenuous voices.

The quagga, however, was a man of destiny,
His wife, whom he had met rather late in her life,
Preferred to sleep, or complain of the food and the weather,
For their little garden was less than paradisiac,
With its artificial sun that either scorched or left you cold,
And savants with cameras eternally hanging around,
To perpetuate the only male quagga in the world.

Perhaps that was why he failed to do it himself;
It is all very well for goats and monkeys -
But the last male of a species is subject to peculiar pressures,
If ancient Satan had come slithering in, perhaps.
But instead the savants, with cameras and notebooks,
Writing sad stories of the decadence of quaggas.

And then one sultry afternoon he started raising Cain.
This angry young quagga kicked the bars and broke a camera;
He even tried to bite his astonished keeper.
He protested loud and clear against this and that,
Till the other animals became quite embarrassed
For he seemed to be calling them names.

Then he noticed his wife, awake with the noise,
And a curious feeling quivered round his belly.
He was Adam: there was Eve.
Galloping over to her, his head flung back,
He stumbled, and broke a leg, and had to be shot.

By D. J. Enright

'There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening' dust-jacket from Medium is the Massage
'Unsettling the dust - CL'