What Remains in the Rainforest (For the Lion-Tailed Macaque)

In the hush of the Western Ghats, where the trees wear centuries in their bark, you move, not with noise, but with memory. A black shadow against green silence, a flick of silver mane, a pulse of life still holding on.

Your tail curls like a question mark above the understory’s grief, and I watch you from below, wondering how a face so ancient, so human, can be made to vanish by chainsaws and forgetting.

You are not just macaque. You are heir to the rain. You are the hymn the forest keeps humming even as the roads push in. Your eyes do not plead, but they know, they know the names of trees we’ve never learned, they know what home feels like when it’s taken from you branch by branch.

In your solitude, you wear your extinction like a crown. Not bitter, not loud, just dignified, a king of canopy and mist, watching your kingdom shrink with every sunrise.

And still, you leap. Still, you nurse your young in shadow. Still, you make peace with wind and fruit and bark as if nothing has changed, as if you trust that someone is listening.

And I am.

I am listening now.

This is not just your story. It is mine, and ours. A story of vanishing, of carelessness, of what we choose to forget until it's gone.

But love can be a kind of remembering. And I remember you, not as a photograph, not as a name in red ink, but as breath, as lineage, as a quiet reminder that survival is a shared act.

So let the forest keep your throne. Let the leaves echo your passage. Let us be the ones who did not look away. Let us be the hands that held your future open and said: not yet.

Not while you're still watching. Not while you're still here.