I find myself envious of extinction:
Snail Darters & other species hanging on the brink...
More envious still of those already vanish'd
from our corrupted & polluted plane
having slipp'd through some dimensional wall,
gone, in a blink of God's eye.
Those lucky beings, now fossilized remains
of some bygone age, elegant in their passing
fossil record the only trace
they were ever here at all.
Given our predilection towards folly,
it is utmost arrogance to assume
we'll endure on the path we've taken.
Someday other, hardier, species
will gaze at our remains & wonder:
exactly what was our place
on this imperfect sphere;
how our biology affected the ecology;
why was this one species banish'd;
how long did man hang on
th'evolutionary brink before
surrendering to th'inevitable?
Insect anthropologists might well conclude
that it was nothing other than the main:
that mankind orchestrated his species’ fall;
an act of ecological suicide due to arrogance.
Hives will bustle with activity (biologically determined)
or perhaps hive mind will have an intellectual epiphany...
Communicating in clicks & subsonic sounds
they will query their collective mind
to decipher messages contain'd
in shards of bone & ruin'd monuments
of our too proud species.
To their compound eyes
our wreck'd cities might seem gigantic hives
for our social structures would be alien to them,
perhaps beyond their ken,
& in those millions of years in between
our rotted flesh become a new fossil fuel
our bones compress'd (by geologic forces)
to glittering, gleaming jewels.
(Copyright 2/6/2006)
Hugh Cobb
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/envious-of-extinction/
