Sarah White

The Vanishing

Weep for the tiny nematodes, diatoms, corals, and crustaceans lost though
we don’t know most of their names yet, let alone how we’ll get along
without them now that they’ve passed into extinction leaving
homo sapiens, the knowing man, alone with his brain
finding light waves from fourteen billion years ago
and discovering nobody in the cosmos close
enough to mourn when we ourselves
pass forever into the shadows
as we’re bound, in time,
to do, given what we
know about the
heat, cold,
and harm
to come.

Sarah White‘s most recent collections include The Unknowing Muse (Dos Madres, 2015), Wars Don’t Happen Anymore (Deerbrook Editions, 2015), and a new collection, to one who bends my time, (Deerbrook Editions, 2017).