gone 700 years today
leaving us here, in the
middle kingdom
Purgatory
which was Paradise once
but which we soiled
and are about to
turn into hell, or
at least an Inferno
for homo sap sap, the
disappearing species
— if it comes to that —
there’s life
left, there will be
life left
and right
it will move
on, even without us
it will rejoice in us
gone — I can hear the
birds celebrating
the trees too
the air cooling
the sea cooling
it will be the real paradise
the one sans-sapiens,
that arrogant inter-
ference!
Copyright © 2022 by Pierre Joris. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 27, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.