There are creatures whose absence feels like an unfinished song — melodies that linger in the air long after the music stops. The Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, is one such echo in our shared imagination. Once the quiet apex of the Tasmanian wild, it vanished into myth within a single century — hunted, misunderstood, and finally memorialized by those who never truly knew it.
The thylacine was unlike anything else — a marsupial wolf with the face of a fox and stripes like sunlight through a forest canopy. To the settlers who colonized its home, it was a threat to livestock. To nature, it was a balance-keeper. To us now, it is a symbol — of loss, of guilt, and of the delicate line between survival and oblivion.
In its extinction lies a haunting silence. That silence is what inspired this poem:
“The Last Thylacine”
In Tasman’s mists where moonlight sighs,
A shadow drifts beneath pale skies,
Striped ghost of forests lost to flame,
They whisper still your mournful name.
Once you roamed through fern and pine,
A quiet grace, a hunter’s line,
Eyes like embered dusk’s retreat,
Soft paws that never broke deceit.
Men came with guns and hungry laws,
And thunder tore your gentle jaws,
Each echo rang through hollow glade,
As silence bloomed where life once stayed.
The stars were watching when you fell,
They marked your cage, your final cell,
Your heartbeat stilled, yet somewhere near,
Your phantom breath still chills the ear.
Now wind through eucalypt and stone
Still hums a tune that’s all your own,
And every rustle, fleeting seen—
Could be the last Thylacine.
A myth reborn in every dream,
Between what was and what might seem,
O ghost of stripes and amber gleam,
Run free forever through the dream.
The poem is a lament, but also a plea. It imagines the thylacine not as gone, but as transformed — reborn in myth, in memory, in the shifting leaves of Tasmanian forests. Each stanza tries to balance grief with reverence: the first evokes its lost wilderness, the middle stanzas recall its persecution, and the closing verses return it to the imagination — where it cannot die.
Today, sightings of the thylacine are still whispered, always unproven. But perhaps that’s fitting. Extinction, after all, is not just a biological end — it’s a test of how long the living will remember.
The thylacine’s ghost reminds us that every silence in nature once had a voice. And if we listen carefully, perhaps we can still hear its faint, lonely tread through the mist.
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