I speak with the future.
We sit on our skeletons’ bones.
We hear with our skeletons’ bones.
We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.
The original meaning of Paradise: a place,
a walled garden.
Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one.
A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.
Outside it, vanishing species and rivers.
Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden.
Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.
The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again,
restarts.
A kalpa is brief, and wall-less.
Unborn ones, take nothing for granted.
Not nectar, not thirst.
May your lives be uneclipsed, your failures be passing.
May you have your portions of beauty, of grief,
in a garden whose plants and birds I cannot imagine.
Copyright © 2026 by Jane Hirshfield. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 30, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“As the crises of biosphere and human compact steepen, I’ve found myself haunted by thoughts of the future: what we owe those who will follow, what we leave them. This poem judges our current communal choices—and my own life—by borrowing the future’s imagined eyes and lives. The poem’s thoughts of Paradise, its hope that ordinary human happiness might continue against all odds, began in a courtyard-garden conversation with two beloved friends. A kalpa, in Hindu cosmology, is the time it takes a universe to complete one cycle of creation and destruction, before the next may come.”
—Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, includingThe Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which was long listed for the National Book Award. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017.