We are the last generations. Surdas, basch,
Rembrandt, Du Fu, all life, love,
work and worth
Will end in the particular rain. Computers
And chisels
will rust, unpeopled city by city,
Beijing and Boston, Rome, Madras, grow
still.
The kolhoz milkmaid, The Basque goathead, the peasant
Eking his
sustenance from the Nile's silt; old
And young; black, brow; The Rio
millionaire
And those who starve in favela; without
Discrimination,
justice or injustice,
Antagonist and indifferent alike
Will house the
charge of death, and as the dust
Dissolves in the sea, the dolphins too, the
complex
Whales. seaweed may still survive; life's sap
May permeate a
crippled grass; but we,
'The roof and crown of things',if such we are,
Will be defunct.
A mote held up against bright clouds of stars
The earth will move through
universal time
And humankind will not be missed. If some
Distant
intelligence scans the earth some day,
Mozart will be vibrations to them. Our
relics,
Our alien skeletons, and history
That led us to the radiance we
attained
Will make them merely curious; but to assign
Human feelings to
beings with their own
Is fanciful; who knows what they will sense
When
data of this planet and the signs
Of an extinct consciousness reach them, it
marks
Of art, its dwellings, its Great Wall, its highways,
Its books in
which decipherable lie
Passion and knowledge
The six-year-old's giant snowball slips
Down to the valley. He runs after
it
To the far slope, then falls, and it rolls back
Its accreted mass to
crush him. Too late we perceive
Our playthings, grown autonomous, knowledge
and use,
This practical, that ideal Good at last
Rear doomtoys that will
undo nine-tenths of us
Leaving the breathing dead we call survivors
On a
radiant waste. Viruses perhaps
May breed despite a thousand shocks. We will
not
Once so mutated see a new live child.
The custom of frenzy, pride and fear will ebb
Only with us; soon fifty nations
will cluck
Over their extirpative eggs: and governments
Will get their
sages, journeymen and maniacs
As randomly as in past centuries
The toxic
madmen who come to sting mankind
Every so often will not forbear to
appear
In deference to changed circumstance; and Hitler
Will not grow
sweetly scrupulous when next
He froths in his bunker. Someone, sooner or
later
Will view this world through the eyes of capable hate
And 'earth
of the slumbering and liquid trees',
The apple-blossomed earth will nurse its
dead
Or tortured and denatured crust, and our stain,
For all its
promise, power and prayer, will die
It is a pity. Life is, or can be, good.
To sing, eat, swim, work, sleep,make
love - to be
Breathing and out of pain, to have the arm
Of one's friend
around one, or one's ears surrounded
By the deep quilt of music, to see the
stars,
To understand their fire - but here it grows
More hazardous - for
what was it but that
That will now bring us death, this will to know -
And ultimate knowledge is not ultimate power
But ultimate and seeable
helplessness;
And though it is for our few generations
To value living
these particular days
Until the earth rejoins its fellow-planets
In
common lifelessness, circling around
Their mother-star in deepening
entropy,
rejoin it will, and soon. It is a pity
But nothing new to an
old universe.