poetry wednesday.

My thanks to Tony Stowers for pointing me to a powerful piece of writing, I am for the woods against the world, in which the poem below was included.

"And so another day begins and the world turns and all of us do more or less what we did yesterday and meanwhile the world is ending but this is not really our business and what can we do anyway and if you think I'm going to make any sacrifices for you or for anyone else you don't understand human nature.

And so it goes on, so we go on, living in the most comfortable, the most wonderful, the most physically desirable state any human has ever lived in, pampered, warm, full of chocolate and wine, moving without moving, traveling across oceans in hours and believing it is all quite natural and that it will last forever and not only last forever but keep getting better because we believe it will be so and so it must be...

Yet in the back of our minds, those of us who use them, in the back of our minds is something we will not face. It is something which winks at us, ever so quietly. It is something which says it is too late. It is too late, the bubble will burst and you will be faced again with the wild from which you come for the wild is taking you back and all your self-delusions with it. Your windfarms will not save you now for nothing will save you now and for the orang utan and the skua and the coral and the mahogany this is news to gladden the heart. For you stopped understanding what you are and where you came from and what you had the right to do and you believed, all of you, even those who thought that you did not believe it, that all things human came before all things other, and you were wrong and now you will pay and maybe, perhaps, maybe you will even learn something."

For a Coming Extinction
W. S. Merwin

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 stalks
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 its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important