Bird Silence

Forests of the Hawaiian islands are quiet today

for eight distinct extinct songs have all died away.

Their disappearances have broken the biological sound of “sacred lands.”

The yellow-brown-gray Kauaʻi nukupuʻu,

hidden high in the peak of leaves

with a high pitch, is gone.

And the green-gray, olive-yellow Kauaʻi ʻakialoa,

with its long beak to drink nectar

and chirp a less known melody, does not live on.

No tiny black Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird answered

her mate’s last mating call

during the break of dawn.

The black-brown-gray kāmaʻo, large Kaua‘i thrush,

cannot sing its liquid-warbled croon.

Nor the Maui ʻākepa, uʻi with its pastel green blush,

share its ʻōhiʻa lehua-honeyed tune.

The more quiet gray-green, green, olive-green, yellow

Maui nukupu‘u has vanished from sight.

And the thwock sounding flaming-red, brown

kākāwahie nani, killed by parasitic infection, has ended its flight.

The brown-gray-white-silver

poʻo-uli snail eater exists in record alone.

All that is left of these eight Hawaiian birds is bone.

Our actions—bringing invasive species, diseases, and climate change—are to blame.

We must make a eulogy-song for these silenced birds;

they needed our intervention that never came.