Crow’s Elephant Totem Song

Once upon a time God made this Elephant. Then it was delicate and small It was not freakish at all Or melancholy The Hyenas sang in the scrub: You are beautiful— They showed their scorched heads and grinning expressions Like the half-rotted stumps of amputations— We envy your grace Waltzing through the thorny growth O take us with you to the Land of Peaceful O ageless eyes of innocence and kindliness Lift us from the furnaces And furies of our blackened faces Within these hells we writhe Shut in behind the bars of our teeth In hourly battle with a death The size of the earth Having the strength of the earth. So the Hyenas ran under the Elephant‘s tail As like a lithe and rubber oval He strolled gladly around inside his ease But he was not God no it was not his To correct the damned In rage in madness then they lit their mouths They tore out his entrails They divided him among their several hells To cry all his separate pieces Swallowed and inflamed Amidst paradings of infernal laughter. At the Resurrection The Elephant got himself together with correction Deadfall feet and toothproof body and bulldozing bones And completely altered brains Behind aged eyes, that were wicked and wise. So through the orange blaze and blue shadow Of the afterlife, effortless and immense, The Elephant goes his own way, a walking sixth sense, And opposite and parallel The sleepless Hyenas go Along a leafless skyline trembling like an oven roof With a whipped run Their shame-flags tucked hard down Over the gutsacks Crammed with putrefying laughter Blotched black with the leakage and seepings And they sing: ‘Ours is the land Of loveliness and beautiful Is the putrid mouth of the leopard And the graves of fever Because it is all we have—‘ And they vomit their laughter. And the Elephant sings deep in the forest-maze About a star of deathless and painless peace But no astronomer can find where it is.

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Crow’s Elephant Totem Song - meaning Summary

Innocence Beyond Corruption

This myth-like poem contrasts the Elephant's original innocence with the Hyenas' envy, violence, and self-consuming misery. After they destroy him, the Elephant returns tougher and wiser, moving apart from their degraded world. His song imagines a remote peace beyond death and pain, while the Hyenas can only celebrate the ugliness they inhabit. The poem presents innocence as vulnerable, but also as capable of surviving corruption without joining it.

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