Naming the Elephants

Who decides the names?
Whose word for mother, aunt, father,
the cinnamon-shades

of mud and light—and the rain
which separates seasons? Who names
the offspring waiting eighteen

months to be born, knowing
weightlessness as the world they love,
and the mothers swaying, feeling

their bodies shimmer
like the bones of the dead, what we call
graveyard, where they pause for hours,

not Rachel, not Leah, to listen and hear
beyond the rustle of wings and air,
what we call grieving.