Amber Harris Extinction Expert Fears For Humans	back to table of contents back to main

I
So this new-age Nostradamus traveled
Across the Rockies to tell us the end
Is nigh (scientifically it’s revealed).

He knows because mortal earth cannot mend
Its aging self any better than him
Or me or you.  “Sorry, but time won’t bend.”

Think of mass extinctions, the Cambrian
As it collapsed into a stone story—
Reduced down to fossilized seraphim.

Sure, he says, look for lunar territory
But the odds are against our doomed species,
Death enters all life, it’s mandatory.

The plants will go first so that our lungs seize
And every famished eukaryote
Is triumphed by bacteria’s single-celled ease.

But even the amoeba cannot gloat,
For the red giant will consume it all.
(Simply, Earth is a PhD’s endnote.)

II
Then we gather for luncheon in a barren hall.
Thirty or so grazing on bland turkey,
We chew thoroughly on our downfall.

College student minds no longer carefree
(For a few minutes perhaps) we’re silent.
The astrobiologist makes a plea—

We look at one another with contempt.
The science guru wants to know just what
Would make us protest, become vigilant.

Youthful and bursting our collective gut,
Apathy stares down academia.
Why must we flee our comfortable rut?

There’s a hole in the ozone above Gaea,
Terrorism, snipers, so much snafu.
We are hated with Pax Americana,

We forgot to vote, or didn’t care to
See our leaders put the world in a box
And label it Evil. (We know it’s true.)

III
I remembered Lascaux and the aurochs,
“Man loves what he destroys” (and all of that)
Amounts to denial and aftershocks.

On Santa Monica, that man, his cats,
Dressed in bonnets and telling our future
Hungry animals plead to democrats—

The lines between our politics just blur
Into meaninglessness and frivolity
And the dream we all dreamed takes a detour.

“I will never,” says a classmate with glee,
“Be a patriot for a country which
Blatantly whores itself on a marquee.”

The futility swallows me like pitch.
Talk on and on about these ills, this doom,
My little purpose begins to unstitch—

We have evolved our skills to live and consume
Ourselves the way these thoughts, sharp and certain,
Deepen the reality of our tomb.
 

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