Vox Populi
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Dion O’Reilly: Post Anthropocene
Can we imagine such emptiness? Such quiet.
Every bit of us, gone: the jackal-mouthed
and gospel-wild, razor wire
keeping out the needful
of our kind, even the ruins of holy cities,
flattened by viral belief.
We have no proof of our own
definitive end.
No name for the never-seen,
for the tangle of worms and beetles
thriving on us,
no name
for whatever creature
comes next: but let them be
thoughtless,
cleaned of reason, dumb
as water,
only a trace of us
left inside them
and above them
and everywhere they look.
~~~~
Poem copyright Dion O’Reilly. Originally published in RockPaperPoem.
Dion O’Reilly’s books include Limerance (Floating Bridge Press, 2025). She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.
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Yes. Amen.
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Yes and yes – “only a trace of us”
I think about this on the regular, that certainly we, as we know ourselves today, will one day be extinct, but some part of us will live on. How amazing that we existed at all, and oh the grief and joy of impermanence.
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Yes!
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As a writer of both poetry and speculative fiction, I am moved deeply by the sci-fi vision of this poem.
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Yes. It certainly seems as though our demise might be a good thing. And perhaps it won’t take that long. I hope my children, my grandchildren and I will have time to go peacefully before the event of total annihilation.
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Some day the rhizomes or the nematodes or something yet unknown, will burst through the straightjacket we are squeezing nature into. Perhaps they will also gnaw through the straightjacket we are “embracing” ourselves in? The anthropocene is the horrorshow epoch.
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Humanity is an invasive species destroying its own habitat. The balance will be restored eventually, and if we survive, it will be as a species in balance with the natural world.
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Some wistful part of me is grateful in the realization of how perfectly well the world will do without us. That day seems so imminent doesn’t it. Here I sit in the middle of another week of my life, despite and perhaps because of most everything, yet believing I know what to wish for.
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