Donald Mace Williams

The Return

     News Item: Scientists hope to bring back the
     prehistoric mammoth herds.

You know you can’t be a preacher now, Dad said
today when I got the OK on my internship
with Project Bring Them Back. Why not, I said,
humoring him as always. Because, he said,
you can’t serve God and mammoth. Ah. Of course.
Preaching was never in question, as Dad knew.
Dad. Short and fair, and I’m tall and as brown
as Mom’s hot biscuits. She’s blonde, too. Both have
blue eyes like mine, but that’s no proof. Someday
I’ll get up nerve and ask them who I am.
I’ve hinted at it once or twice. They looked
as if I’d asked how often they had sex.
Doc Malenkov, that genius weirdo, knows.
He once called the Project people amateurs,
then caught himself and laughed. What in the hell?
He and the folks are keeping something from me,
but never mind for now. I’m overcome
by the day’s news. I’ve known since kindergarten
something was waiting for me, something more
than the wonders my brains and muscles would get me,
more by far than my world record javelin throw,
which I made without even having to train.
Something: I smell them, I hear their tusks clash,
feel the ice shake when they see me and take to their hooves. 
Whoever my parents are, this is my life.
It starts this summer, making the herd-that-was be.  

Donald Mace Williams is a retired newspaper writer and editor with a Ph.D. in Beowulfian prosody. His second book of poems, The Nectar Dancer, was published in August 2023 by Stoney Creek Publishers, and his new translation, Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom, also from Stoney Creek Publishers, has just been published and is available at https://www.tamupress.com/book/9798987900277/beowulf/. He lives in Austin.