A scattering
by Christopher Reid

I expect you've seen the footage: elephants,
finding the bones of one of their own kind
dropped by the wayside, picked clean by the scavengers
and the sun, then untidily left there,
    decide to do something about it.
But what, exactly? They can't, of course,
reassemble the old elephant magnificence;
they can't even make a tidier heap. But they can
hook up bones with their trunk and chuck them
    this way and that way. So they do.
   And their scattering has an air
of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.
Their great size, too, makes them the very
embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks
   lends sprezzatura.
   Elephants puzzling out
the anagram of their own anatomy,
elephants at their abstracted lamentations -
may their spirit guide me as I place
   my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.

I love this poem by Christopher Reid!
You'll find it in his collection of poems -- A Scattering -- which was written as a tribute to his wife who died.