echo of the last roar by Gavin Tesser

Check out this poem titled echo of the last roar, by our Founder, Gavin Tesser, which won a Regional Gold Key in the 2025 Scholastic Art & Writing Competition! Through this poem, Gavin channels his eco-anxiety into an educational tool and a call for action.

at 17,

I watch apex predators

dissolve

into pixels,

into propaganda,

into ghosts.

bengal tigers growl

through glowing screens that diminish their roar,

while their broken and barren bodies wither

in shrinking scraps of forest—

once flourishing, now forlorn.

I count their numbers

like limited editions:

2,482 in the wild,

2,099 by next spring,

731 by graduation,

0 by 2075.

through money-hungry eyes  

extinction equals earnings,

they sell tiger plushies

@ $12.99 apiece,

stitched with the same sentiment

that desecrated their sacred hunting space.

so this— 

this is the apocalypse:

not fire,

      not fury,

just silence.

in biology I learned

DNA carries

ancient memory,

so I wonder—

what is a species’ last thought?

does it remember the taste of rain?

late at night,

I stream documentaries,

tears falling—

oceans too warm to sustain life

as corporate manifestos boast

“sustainability by 2050.”

but extinction

doesn’t wait for

quarterly reports;

a million heartbeats

become dozens,

dozens,

  become none.

they will put the last tiger

in a glass case,

next to dodo bones,

and say,

       “we did our best.”

I am 17,

yet I know better.

I see their skeletal ribs

in my nightmares,

each bone a monument

to everything we destroyed.

I feel the weight

of their extinction

pressing into my chest,

a crushing reminder

that we turned life into relics,

ecosystems into graveyards.

the future is empty,

their numbers are falling,

I am still counting—

but now I will not stop at 0.