Alan Dolan - Species: A Reflection on Lost Light

Gone now, their light was spent <br />Before we walked the earth <br />To claim them beautiful. <br />No feather-colour fossils <br />Reflect their once-owned sunlight; <br />No field guide captured their unknowable <br />Strange-plumage dance on younger continents. <br /> <br />They must have felt the birth-urge <br />And their genes catapulting towards oblivion <br />Were all; in a spring of green earth music <br />As images of their last <br />And futile making-time <br />Left softly on their forever journey <br />Towards a gentle emptiness of distant <br />Flowers of light. <br /> <br />And their sun-discovered uniqueness, <br />Wryneck subtle or sunbird-gaudy, <br />Snatched from the smashed palette <br />Of their awesome creation. <br /> <br />And a million species extinct now, <br />Not just odd-balls: <br />Too trusting, too large or too rare, <br />But all those which could not adapt <br />To the changing canvass of a forgotten time. <br />Their colours space-rainbows in eternity, <br />Their light strange quasars someday.<br /><br />Alan Dolan<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/species/