Extinction

How beautiful some things are
when slowed
right down —
starlings,
bulbs exploding,
a storm erupting from thin air,

or how the world keeps on then turning
in its sleep below

a hurricane’s brute eye cycling.
And still we see only

mechanisms here
or patterns in the sky
that amount
to cold logic —

how heat plus wind gives birth to rain

how everything is simply
ordered chaos ripe

for harvesting. But not everything

that shifts through us
is scripted physics,

not all that’s set in motion
can be stalled. Take how
a sea-hawk tries to halt

mid-dive then keeps
on falling
right through the sky towards

oblivion
or how
extinction works
the way light disintegrates

from a television screen.

But then I think there could
be beauty
in this too,

some grace
in our unravelling. No smoke signals,

no hullabaloo. Just another animal
pressed to mute

as a planet learns to pick off
from its skin old scabs.