The Song Is Gone
A poem about disappearing creatures
The song is gone,
Old insects are done carrying it.
We laid them to rest. Painted with our perfume
And showered with drops of our desire
They were lost in our appalling perfection:
Fields of fine filligree
That fermented into glass, a barren mirror.
No new legs are born, and with it breaks the beaks
That broke sky’s surface, and her silence
Now is silence in the nest. No clouds conform,
Their rain is bitter, and bites hard on open bud.
Speechless, I sit with seed, dry and not growing,
Hands open, ungrasping. The breeze
Barely registering, she will have none
Of me, she misses
Free feather and click of wing.
Worlds have come shattering,
But so silently.
“Our countryside is in the process of becoming a veritable desert…there are hardly any insects left”: intensive pesticide use is causing a “wipe-out” of bird populations in France. — via Robert Macfarlane
