In the world of the signaling, singing, weeping apes,
There’s always another binary debate. Today,
As handsome flotillas of clouds flared their sails
In the sun, swanning along the afternoon between
Rains that just were and the rains yet to come,
One could root out from bookstores, screens,
And magazines an either/or fallacy about progress
And the apocalypse. We are, to be sure, accelerating
And our acceleration keeps accelerating by jerks,
As our numbers grow and our nurdles pile up,
As our depredations intensify and our artifice
Talks to itself. What does this mean? Where
Will we go? When we will go and be gone?
One camp specializes in focusing on disasters,
Although oddly almost always picking only one
To identify as The One: the bomb, the climate,
The trash, the robots, the population, the plague,
The genetic engineering, the coming famine.
The other camp combs through the past
And comes up with graphs, graphs on graphs,
Showing the good numbers climbing, the bad
Items—violence, disease, starvation, crime—
In erratic but mostly continuous decline.
Humans. We want to think we’ll all be gone
Tomorrow, or else we’ll thrive and rocket around.
Don’t we ever face the feeling we’ll sink only
Slowly, slowly, like rain on already wet ground?
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