Echoes of Extinction

Whispers of Return: A Poem

The sun departs, again,
As it has always done.
It brightens high, then dims,
And will, until its end.

Oh do you see?
This is the future, my dearest:
A harrowing repetition,
A sorrowful contradiction.

Look, my dearest, out before you.
Behold this residue of the humans’
Foretold destiny – their doom:
Technology.
Disintegrating skeletons
Of concrete, stone, and steel;
Their toxic lakes and plastics will persist
To strangle Nature’s more
Harmonious ones
For millennia to come.

That was millennia ago.
Now behold the world
Without the human ego.

For we have our ego now.
Built over the remains
Of their crude innovations.
Have we learned their lessons?
The warning that their self-destruction
Constitutes?

Oh yes, my dearest, I know
You know these truths.
But we mustn’t merely know;
It is our task to live
According to the lessons
Which we claim we know.

For every new creation, every innovation,
Every thought, pursued or followed
To fruition; each and every one, enacted,
Is an alteration of what came before
Or already was. That means: what had
Already been, had had its essence
Tampered with, twisted, torn apart,
Perverted. My dear, this is the meaning
Of all creation, beginning with the seed.
Everything new disturbs what already is.
Those humans, dear, had merely been the first
To interfere too much, to pollute too much,
Pervert too much.
They viewed the problem of creation
Differently. Their teachers, too intoxicated
By poetry’s seductive pull. They did not
Grasp that to create means to pervert, pollute, destroy.

What have we learned? Are we evolved?
Improved? Superior?
My dearest, sadly, no.
We may be less depraved than they,
But in a way, perhaps, in truth,
We’re even worse than they.
Newer creations in a longer line
Extending out millennia.

Look at the sun, as he sets,
How he departs with measured grace.
Even dim, it’s still so bright.
Evolution is absurd.
Harrowing repetition,
Our sorrowful contradiction.

Until the ebb, when darkness
Merges with the light
And all will rest in silence,
And then will all begin again.

From everlasting to everlasting.