It is agreed that life as we know it must come to the end of its tether
by global warming or nuclear winter or whatever
seizure befalls nor will it be humans who watch the sun’s demise
as it sucks Earth, Mars, and Venus inside
itself before it collapses from red giant to white dwarf
and we, supreme products of Darwinian selection, will have morphed
into what? going backward, perhaps, to the amoebae we arose
from more than four billion years ago
up from the cave drawings at Lascaux
from the slaughter of bison and passenger pigeons
from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to lie eyes open
in Keat’s unslumbrous night.
For however long it takes it will serve us right.
from And Short the Season, W.W. Norton, 2014
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