Animal

S O S

Animal

J. Octavio Pineda

Primera edición / First edition / Première édition, Taller de Edición • Rocca®

Febrero de 2020 / February 2020 / Février 2020

Bogotá, D. C., Colombia

ISBN impreso / print / impression: 978-958-48-8057-4 (Esp, Eng, Fra)

ISBN digital / électronique: 978-958-48-8058-1 (Esp), 978-958-48-8946-1 (Eng)

Edición y producción editorial / Editing and production / Édition et production éditoriale:

Taller de Edición • Rocca® S. A. S.

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Bogotá, D. C., Colombia

Editor general / General editor / Éditeur général: Luis Daniel Rocca Lynn

Coordinación editorial / Editorial coordination / Coordination éditoriale: Juanita Rocca Toro

Diseño y diagramación / Design and layout / Design et mise en page: Julieta Arias Muñoz / Juan Pablo Rocca Barrenechea

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hecho en Colombia • Made in Colombia • Fait en Colombie

ANIMAL SOS

Foreword

Literature is my great passion, but all that happens to our beautiful and battered planet is my great concern. For a long time, this has not allowed me to read and write as calmly and joyfully as I would like, as something caught in my throat, which I was able to express in the form of this compendium of seriously endangered species, this collection of animal poems.

Complete ecosystems are being deforested or degraded daily. Thousands of species of flora and fauna are being destroyed or trafficked for absurd purposes, the result of human frivolity or superstition. Plastics flood the oceans. Global warming produces increasingly extreme phenomena, to such degree that the Arctic, for example, has become something sadder than a summer beach, among other very serious problems.

Despite this, the vast majority of people, so unaware that they seem anesthetized, continue to behave as if all this was occurring on another planet and not on this one, which has been and is our only home. And though I have addressed all these challenges in journalistic articles or social media, including possible solutions and success stories, it has not been enough.

So I decided to resort to a straighter language, a more powerful message, giving voice to some of those exotic species, some of those beautiful, cornered animals, that have been with us for thousands of years, even in our fantasies and our dreams, and are seeing their existence increasingly threatened.

Let these brief lines, originally written in three languages that I know well (looking forward to their translation into many others for the message to reach all corners of the planet), work as an SOS from those fantastic creatures that we have not been able to value and need all of our urgent commitment and help, with mitigation and rescue actions, a more sustainable development, and more responsible production and consumption practices.

This reduced number of animal ambassadors is just a tiny representation of the great biodiversity that our planet houses and whose wealth we are squandering.

I am confident that these animal laments will be echoed and, above all, will move to immediate action, because time is running out ... not only for them, but for all of us.

If these cries for help do not move us as humans, nothing will, and we’ll continue forging our own fate, not promising at all in the way we are behaving.

The lion

I thought I was the king of the jungle,

until a true tyrant arrived

and took over my domains.

He has cornered me, with all my subjects,

into reserves of fragile borders that shrink day by day.

Like in the courts of medieval castles,

whose walls are often decorated

with portraits of former monarchs,

the hairy heads of my ancestors

adorn as a trophy, as a tribute to ignominy,

the walls of mansions of hunters of prey.

That’s why I now say that I’m the king of nothing.

The giraffe

They say I am a mix of camel and leopard,