Let me read you two poems by a poet whose work
I love very dearly, W.S. Merwin on much the same theme.
This poem is called "For a Coming Extinction."
Gray whale now that we are sending you
to the end that great God, tell him that we who follow you
invented forgiveness and forgive nothing.
I write as though you could understand and I could say it.
One must always pretend something among the dying.
When you have left the seas nodding on their stocks
empty of you, tell him that we were made on another day.
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo winding along
your inner mountains unheard by us and find its way out,
leaving behind it the future, dead and ours.
When you will not see again the whale calves trying the light,
consider what you will find in the black garden
and it's caught.
The sea cows, the great auk, the gorillas,
the irreplaceable hosts ranged countless and fore ordaining
us stars our sacrifices.
Join your word to theirs.
Tell him that it is we who are important.
From the same book, The Lice, "The Asians Dying."
When the forests have been destroyed,
their darkness remains.
The ash, the great walker follows the possessors forever.
Nothing they will come to is real nor for long.
Over the water courses like ducks in the time of ducks,
the ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
making a new twilight.
Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
again, again with its pointless sound.
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything.
The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed.
The dead go away like bruises.
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands, pain.
The horizon remains.
Overhead, the seasons rock.
They are paper bills calling to nothing living.
The possessors move everywhere under death, their star.
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows.
Like thin flames with no light, they with no past and fire,
their only future.