The Elephants' Graveyard

Okay, Willow's challenge this week was to write a piece inspired by the little fecker above. This is my piece. For much more accomplished takes on the prompt, please visit the link to the site above.

In the elephants’ graveyard, the space is quite tight,
For reasons not too hard to figure.
The corpses to acreage ratio’s quite
A bane to the poor old gravedigger.
He silently curses
At elephant hearses
(He’d hoped they’d be cured by the elephant nurses)
He frantically digs as the black truck reverses.
He’s been working all day and for half of the night
But still the hole needs to be bigger.

In the elephants’ graveyard, it takes forty men
To drop the oak box down the gully.
The each grab a yard of the wire rope and then
They lower it down on a pulley.
The tired volunteers
Mouthe unspoken cheers
As the bloody great box inch by inch disappears
While the elephant’s family stands round in tears.
And every man whispers a breathless “Amen”
When the coffin is lowered down fully.

In the elephants’ graveyard, (where life’s been trunk-ated)
The worms are the crème de society.
Their body mass index is grossly inflated
Compared to the garden variety.
From the moment of birth
There is never a dearth
Of elephant flesh in the bounteous earth.
They spend their existence augmenting their girth.
Thank God that the elephants don’t get cremated,
They say, with a touch of anxiety.