🐅 The Tiger and the Thylacine: A Tale of Two Silences

History has two faces — one that roars, and one that vanishes quietly.

The tiger still walks the forests of Asia, shadowed yet sovereign, surviving despite humankind’s encroachment.
The thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, last blinked in captivity — its final breath recorded in the cold light of a camera.

Both were hunted, both feared, both admired.
But one was “saved,” and the other was “forgotten.”
In this bilingual reflection, I explore these intertwined fates through two poems:
a Hindi piece titled “बाघ की साँसें” (The Tiger’s Breaths) and an English companion poem “The Thylacine’s Ghost.”

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🌿 Poem 1: बाघ की साँसें (The Tiger’s Breaths)

Hindi Poem:

जंगल की नमी में कुछ अनकहे शब्द हैं,
पत्तों के नीचे बाघ की साँसें छुपी हैं।
शिकारी की आँखें अब भी जगमगाती हैं,
पर बाघ अब सपना नहीं, सबक है।

नदियों में बहती है उसकी थरथराहट,
पिंजरों में नहीं, पेड़ों की छाँव में बसता है।
तुमने उसके धब्बे गिने थे कभी?
अब हर धब्बा एक चेतावनी है।

सभ्यता की बंदूकें अब जंग खा रही हैं,
पर डर अभी भी नया है —
कि कहीं बाघ याद न कर ले,
किसने उसका घर जलाया था।

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Line-by-line English Meaning:

जंगल की नमी में कुछ अनकहे शब्द हैं — In the dampness of the forest lie words unspoken,
पत्तों के नीचे बाघ की साँसें छुपी हैं। — beneath the leaves, the tiger’s breaths remain hidden.

शिकारी की आँखें अब भी जगमगाती हैं, — The hunter’s eyes still gleam in the dark,
पर बाघ अब सपना नहीं, सबक है। — but the tiger is no longer a dream; it is a warning.

नदियों में बहती है उसकी थरथराहट, — Its tremor runs through rivers and roots,
पिंजरों में नहीं, पेड़ों की छाँव में बसता है। — it does not live in cages but in the shade of trees.

तुमने उसके धब्बे गिने थे कभी? — Did you ever count its stripes?
अब हर धब्बा एक चेतावनी है। — Now each stripe is a scar, a signal, a warning.

सभ्यता की बंदूकें अब जंग खा रही हैं, — The guns of civilization now rust in silence,
पर डर अभी भी नया है — — yet the fear is still fresh —
कि कहीं बाघ याद न कर ले, — that the tiger might remember,
किसने उसका घर जलाया था। — who burned down his home.

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✍️ Analysis and Motivation

This Hindi poem borrows its rhythm from modern Indian resistance poetry — a style seen in the works of Muktibodh, Agyeya, and Raghuvir Sahay.
Their verses often disguised political dissent within natural imagery — rivers, forests, winds, and animals serving as metaphors for oppression and rebellion.

Here, the tiger is not just a majestic creature but an embodied memory of ecological violence.
Its survival is defiance — against extinction, against silence, and against selective human mercy.

Each stanza invokes a growing unease: nature remembers. The tiger remembers.

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🕯️ Poem 2: The Thylacine’s Ghost

They said I looked like a tiger,
but smaller, stranger, misplaced.
My stripes were history’s trial marks —
proof of resemblance, reason for death.

The men with flashlights called it mercy,
when they locked the last of us in steel.
They said, “You are legend now.”
But legends don’t rot in cages.

The forest forgot our footsteps first,
the wind unlearned our scent.
Only the stars, indifferent and old,
remember the silence we left behind.

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🌑 Interpretation

Where the Hindi poem roars, the English poem whispers.
The Thylacine’s Ghost is told in the voice of extinction — reflective, mournful, and stripped of resistance.
It echoes the tradition of Ted Hughes’ animal poems, where beasts mirror human cruelty,
and Margaret Atwood’s ecological elegies, where memory is both protest and requiem.

The final stanza, “The forest forgot our footsteps first,” encapsulates a chilling truth:
forgetting can be more fatal than killing.

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🐾 Comparative Reflection

Theme	The Tiger	The Thylacine
Symbol	Survival, resistance	Extinction, silence
Tone	Defiant, prophetic	Mournful, elegiac
Imagery	Forests, rivers, fire	Cages, stars, wind
Voice	The survivor’s warning	The vanished one’s lament
Message	“Remember what you destroyed.”	“Remember what you forgot.”

Both poems inhabit the space between myth and memory.
Together, they expose the moral asymmetry of human conservation — why some species are protected, while others are allowed to fade into folklore.

The tiger still walks, bruised but breathing.
The thylacine walks only in dreams — yet both are mirrors of our choices, the echo of our dominion.

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🌍 Final Thoughts

This poetic diptych asks an uncomfortable question:
Do we save creatures out of love — or guilt?
And when extinction becomes a story, do we mourn the animal or the myth we made of it?

In the quiet of the jungle and the ghostly light of the museum,
one truth lingers — the tiger roars, the thylacine whispers, and both are speaking to us.