Now that I have become old I wish
I could write a poem expressing how I feel
That everything to which the earth gives birth
Every cat & dog & & newt & frog & stick & stone
Is so precious and so lovely, but maybe that
Is because about I am so soon to leave it,
For Aquinas says:
‘The last things to be said, especially by friends
who are about to leave us, are those best
remembered. At such a time our love for
our friends is greatest, and what we love most
is what sinks deepest into our hearts.’
He was writing of Jesus’s last meal with his friends
Before his passion that we remember in
The eucharist, the symbol of the gathering
Into one of everything that does, ever has,
Or ever will exist in the further dimension
Of the divine unity. Will it be so? I do wonder.
Or are the atheists right when they tell us that
Death in only switching off the light followed
By the long rot? And how for future generations
The earth later this century will be devastated
In a tragedy so vast and terrible and awful
We cannot imagine it, because this generation
Is hell-bent on destroying our only mother earth
And so many of the precious and lovely things in it
(For the scientists are now pretty much
Agreed that half the species that exist will
Have disappeared by the end of the century
And climate change will devastate us all). I wish
I could write all this in a poem but I cannot write it
So goodbye earth. Let this be the poem I cannot write.
