Sixth Mass Extinction

Unrestrained artilleries of paper swans folded
and released by night’s smoke. Almost
nothing left to name the land
in its image. Our dead convinced
the wind to sing us gone.
The sea sent whips of water
to slick the rocks from her wrist.
Name this revenge. Name it absence. Name
the embers numberless as stars as
our daughter walks alone
toward the sun’s eastward bloom.
A bird above her struggling with a
used tissue to use again for rebuilding
its nest. The land’s torn paper
opening a delta to post-history,
to our daughter and her name.
There are cockroaches everywhere and our
dead laugh. Fire-poppies shake ash
from their foreheads and
the wind whispers the sea
still. We could tend to
none of the world’s failures because
we were one, but
we tended to our daughter,
and we wait now with
our dead to see what she’ll do with
the world we left her.