The Saddest Word of All

The saddest word of all

describes the final living member

of a species.

This terrible little word

we invented to remember

the living dead;

the creature whose future

is to be forever lonely,

and nothing else.

The saddest word of all

we created, because we created

the endling.

Do you think they know

that it's goodnight when they die?

There's no peers

and no elders to lean on

when life becomes a messy danger?

Do they fear it?

Millions – trillions of years. Aeons

made the animal beautifully suited

to their place

to their space, to their species.

In a world that humans have spent a century

gleefully wrecking

in the name of expansion. The irony

is as cutting as the obnoxious moniker

is misnamed: ‘growth’.

Humans can do anything

and meld the world to our needs

crazy quick;

no other life on this planet

can even hope to keep pace

with the rampage.

But we explode things and dig holes and build

such shrines to the power of money:

at what cost?

What a world where such an idea exists.

Where our guilt preys on our minds

(as it should),

but all we are capable of doing

to assuage that nagging brain

is to coin new words.

So we write these poems about them,

mannered stanzas which weep drear, for endlings

make us sad.