Only The Land Remains
Only the land remains when all is done;
as in the beginning so in the end.
After his few ticks of time man will be gone
but in the end all that remains is the land.
Those ancient ones who, having been here for
tens of thousands of years, laugh at our mere two hundred,
but the land’s rumbling laugh will nurture
us as long as we last, in sun and rain, silence and thunder.
Even the life of the land that we hunt and swat
and harvest and eat, laughs at our claims
of permanency, having begun before our lot
and when we’re gone they will remain.
But as long as the land remains
it understands, as we do not, mortality,
the end of all things, the loss, eventually, of all gains,
that the cosmos, even after the land’s fatality,
will persist, even if for an aeon it sleeps.
The coffee grows cold, the blood thins
and the sky moves like a wheel overhead and it all keeps
on and on until only the land remains.
