Passenger Pigeons
Slowly the passenger pigeons increased, then suddenly their
Numbers became enormous,
They would flatten ten miles of forest when they flew down to roost,
And the cloud of their rising eclipsed the dawns.
They became too many, they are all dead not one remains.
And the American bison: their hordes would hide a prairie from
Horizon to horizon, great heads and storm-cloud shoulders,
A torrent of life - how many are left ?
For a time, for a few years, their hones turned the dark prairies white.
You, Death, you watch for these things. These explosions of life.-
They are your food. They make your feasts.
But turn your great rolling eyes away from humanity
Those grossly craving black eyes. It is true we increase.
A man from Britain landing in Gaul when Rome had fallen he journeyed
Fourteen days inland through that beautiful rich land,
The orchards and rivers and the looted villas-.
He reports he saw no living man.
But now we fill the gaps. In spite of wars, famines and pestilences
We are c/uite suddenly three billion people:
Our hones, ours too, would make wide prairies white,
A beautiful snow of unhuried hones-.
Bones that have twitched and cjuivered in the nights of love,
Bones that have shaken with laughter and hung slack in sorrow,
Coward bones worn out with trembling,
Strong bones broken on the rack, bones broken in battle,
Broad bones gnarled with hard labor, and the little bones
Of sweet young children,
And the white empty skulls, Little carved ivory wine-jugs that used
To contain passion and thought and love and insane delirium,
Where now not even worms live
Respect humanity, Death, these shameless black eyes of yours,
It is not necessary to take all at once - besides that,
You cannot do it, we are too powerful, we are men, not pigeons,
You may take the old, the useless and helpless, the cancer-bitten
And the tender young, but the human race has still history to make.
For look - look now at our achievements.-
We have bridled the cloud-leaper lightning,
A lion whipped by a man, to carry our messages and work our will,
We have snatched the thunderbolt out of God’s hands.
Ha? That was little and last year - for now we have taken the
Primal powers, creation and annihilation;
We make new elements, such as God never saw,
We can explode atoms and annul the fragments, nothing left
But pure energy, we shall use it in peace and war -
“Very clever ,” he answered in his thin piping voice, cruel and a eunuch.
Roll those idiot black eyes of yours on the field-beats,
Not on intelligent man, We are not in your order.
You watched the dinosaurs grow into horror.-
They had been little elves in the ditches and presently became enormous
With leaping flanks and tearing teeth, plated with armor, nothing
could stand against them, nothing but you, death, and they died.
You watched the saber-tooth timers develop those huge fangs,
Unnecessary as our sciences, and presently they died.
You have their hones in the oil-pits and layer rock, you will not have ours.
With pain and wonder and labor we have bought intelligence.
We have minds like the tusks of those forgotten timers,
Hypertrophied and terrible,
We have counted the stars and half-understood them,
We have watched the farther galaxies fleeing away from us,
Wild herds of panic horses - or a trick of distance deceived by the prism -
We outfly falcons and eagles and meteors, faster than sound,
Higher than the nourishing air,
We have enormous privilege, we do not fear you, we have invented
The jet-plane and the death-bomb and the cross of Christ -
“Oh ,” he said, “surely you’ll live forever” -
Grinning like a skull, covering his mouth with his hand -
“What could exterminate you?”
From Robinson Jeffers, “The Beginning and the End”
A lot of interesting work was done on “Jeffers and the Anthropocene” about a decade ago. Last lines of the poem seem to describe current situation of “anthropocene denial,” as does the spell checker. Humans deluding themselves that they are still living in the “holocene” (whatever that means)…