Let’s fold our own tiny poems of what will go with the names we gave them – a craft of remembering, a last Anthropocene legacy.
Let’s press the syllables into paper seams like deep veins of gold before they are hollowed by loss, mined from word caves of our making –
southern corrobboree frog, regent honeyeater, Gilbert’s potaroo, northern hairy-nosed wombat, staghorn coral, mountainous star, nangur spiny skink, largetooth sawfish, Wollemi pine,
Bindoon starbush, grevillea scapigera
These names won’t appear in the toxic topographies our blackened dictionaries become with their listing of methane leaks, ecocide, overconsumption – ten new words a decade for extinction in exchange