What is to be done with our species? Because We know we’re going to die, to be submitted To that tingling dance of atoms once again, It’s easy for us to feel that our lives are a dream— As this is, in a way, a dream: the flailing rain, The birds, the soaked red backpack of the child, Her tendrils of wet hair, the windshield wipers, This voice trying to speak across the centuries Between us, even the long story of the earth, Boreal forests, mangrove swamps, Tiberian wheatfields In the summer heat on hillsides south of Rome—all of it A dream, and we alive somewhere, somehow outside it, Watching.
