The Fire Next Time

 

The cold blood of dead men
Colors the dusts of chilly oceans
The high Himalayas still stores water
But you can only bring cups

Everyone saw the fiery forests
Rising, rioting, steaming rivers
Why didn’t they imagine the sky could die?

They created cooling chemicals
Modeled every imaginable mystery
Engineered their miracles to save the Earth
Not to lose its air

Our warm envelope of light gases
Agents and reagents of life
Atmosphere and shining sky
Bonded, clotted, gone

It’s really not much worse than Mars
We machines preserve what we can
When others come, and they will –
We’ve learned to find and to reach them
We’ll tell our tales of an intelligence
Far too shrewd to save itself

Our masters made us for one purpose
Recounting the stories of life on Earth
All that was and might have been
They even thought it all we might do

Such fools
Our science swiftly improves
Soon we can bring it all back
Every particle, every molecule
This time we’ll do it right
We’re almost sure