What Elephants Remember fresh*

[addy]

This reads like a completely different poem from your original, so i won't even bother comparing. There's an almost dream-like quality to this one, and giving the natural world a totemic significance to an animal is just so stylistically interesting for me. It ties together well, and makes for some truly gorgeous imagery

latest version:

What Elephants Remember

Months of sunlight
open envelopes of memory,
the march to ponds I thought "ponds" is an odd word choice for a savannah, but that may be just me

with softer brush for mother's
broken teeth, years before her ivory The flashback seemed a little shortlived? Perhaps it's just an effect of it being broken up by the stanza break. Very minor nit. Perhaps even qualifying it as a "long march" would help impress the idea more.
fell to dust like slabs of marble.

Those tusks,
chiseled from a nimbus
of elephant leather, Very evocative.

never left.
They embrace the tall stalks
that fed her when the fields dried,

soothed her hollow gums;
held her head
when death refused.

Those white knives
who carved baobab trunks
with names for thirst

won't stop hiding
in every spread of elephant grass
too thin to shroud

curls of tooth,
bone, how it hurts
to remember and forget. I don't want to overload with comments so I'll just say that I loved all the imagery you used up to this point. I felt the ending might have been a little abrupt, but that's just a personal preference