What We’re For

Today could be the day the world ends.
Today could be the next day of your life.

Probably not but probably. Trust the world
To get on with itself, with or without life.

Imagine the latter. Imagination is all you
Can get for death, for a world without life.

Tricky, eh? All you can rummage around
In imagination’s trunk and find is living.

But let’s try. No one will have anything
To say to us, won’t read us, won’t exist

To judge. Also, the planet, or the constant
Maintenance of life on it, then ruins, quiet.

It quit. Maybe humans destroyed it.
Imagination would like that—potent

Humans, favorite topic of imagination,
After all. But gone, with all of it, after all

That. Just a nice blob of iron core spun
Into a bead, a dot, whizzing round its sun,

Like the other inner, rocky planets. Done.
Imagine that. We lie in the dust, perhaps,

But not all of us even stopped at that.
Most patterns wholly burned, evaporated.

Not one of these lines has been left intact,
Not a word. Nothing ever to breathe them

If any had remained. There. That’s gone
For you. What can’t be reconstructed,

Not even for a few fragments, and no one
To reconstruct things. We’re all for that.