I am indebted to my friend Roddy Fox for alerting me to this week’s poem. It is one that chimes so much with what I believe in that I’m almost embarrassed not to have known about it before.
I am indebted to my friend Roddy Fox for alerting me to this week’s poem. It is one that chimes so much with what I believe in that I’m almost embarrassed not to have known about it before.
My excuse is that it was only published in a collection this year by the fine American poet Sam Taylor. It would have made a perfect fit for the anthology For Rhino in a Shrinking World. In fact, it is the shrinking world that constitutes the poem’s subject. Immersed as we are in our own daily lives, it is easy to overlook the bigger picture, easy to assume that we are the centre of the world and that other matters, other lives, are peripheral to ours.
But according to the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2014, released in late September, since 1970 the earth has lost 52% of its biodiversity. Think about that: fifty-two percent! “The number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish across the globe is, on average, about half the size it was 40 years ago,” the report declares.
Today’s poem reminds us of what this can mean, not just for the natural environment but for us too. It isn’t a sermon or a rant, it isn’t meant to lecture us about responsibility or greed; it simply points out, with a remarkable precision of thought and language, the reality of things, a story that may be “telling itself for the last time”. And perhaps its title is the most chilling reminder of all.
The Book of Endings
Some time while you read this page
or the next one, a species –
like you, with your grandmother,
your dozen eggs, your walk in the park,
a species as vast as your life
and the lives of all your ancestors
chasing bison across Old Europe
or huddled around a fire – will disappear.
A species that has found its own
ways of eating, of moving, of
hiding from predators;
a species that meets itself and makes love
in the bark of a tree or on the leaves
of the canopy or in the humid dirt.
And it has come with us for millions
of years, for millions of years,
it has watched the night
and day follow each other, it has breathed
with the frogs, it has wrapped
the stars around it like a blanket,
a patterned music, a map.
At the beginning of this page there may have been three or four left,
but now there is only one.
And if you read this page again,
it will be another one, another species,
another story of four billion years
telling itself for the last time.
Wherever life began – a word, a wish
breathed into water, a seed falling
through space – it was all of us
there – as it is now
in this unknown last one.
It has bored into wood, it has carried
water on its back, it has drunk
the dew from its back in the desert,
it has fed its young with strips of
leaves, it has built homes out of bark,
it has carved the sky into a song,
it has spoken in ways no man has heard.
It has emerald wings
it has sapphire wings
it has wings of night
you will never see it
it is already gone
Sam Taylor
From Nude Descending an Empire, University of Pittsburg Press, 2014
