Elephants

For some reason elephants keep catching my attention. I guess it started because I was thinking about making an elephant. I've wanted, for a long time, to make a stuffed elephant and decorate it lavishly with fancy fabric and beading. Similar to the picture but mine will be much more elaborate!

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Anyway, since I've been noticing elephants, here are a couple of poems that reference elephants and some elephant trivia & quotes!

I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent.
~Dr. Seuss

 Love will draw an elephant through a key-hole.
~Samuel Richardson

When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
~Abraham Lincoln

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• September 22 is Elephant Appreciation Day.
• Elephants are pregnant for nearly 2 years.
• A group of elephants is called a herd, a parade, or a memory.
• The elephant's trunk has about 15,000 muscles, and it takes baby elephants quite some time to learn to master its use. The trunk combines both nose and upper lip and transforms them into a single powerful organ that is able to touch, grasp and smell.
• Elephants are the largest living land animals.
• Elephants live in a structured social order. The females spend their entire lives in tightly knit family groups made up of mothers, daughters, sisters, and aunts. These groups are led by the eldest female called the matriarch. Adult males live mostly solitary lives.

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Ghost Elephants  
by Jean Valentine

In the elephant field
tall green ghost elephants
with your cargo of summer leaves

at night I heard you breathing at the window

Don't you ever think I'm not crying
since you're away from me
Don't ever think I went free

At first the goodbye had a lilt to it—
maybe just a couple of months—
but it was a beheading.

Ghost elephant,
reach down,
cross me over—

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The Elephant in the Room
 by Kay Ryan

It isn’t so much
a complete elephant
as an elephant
sense—perhaps
pillar legs supporting
a looming mass,
beyond which it’s
mostly a guess.
In any case, we
manage with relative
ease. There are just
places in the room
that we bounce off
when we come up
against; not something
we feel we have to
announce.

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