I grieve for this world. Not for the earth, she can take care of herself. I grieve that I will lose this world, that our children will lose this world. It will be lost to them. All the things in it. Life in the world will be lost to them. There will be starvation and pain, disease, and death, too many bodies for anyone to bury. We will burn them. Someone will toss my empty body on a pile of bodies and will throw other. Bodies on top and will light all of our bodies on fire and the fire will reach up and the smoke will rise up and fill the sky and the ashes will fall down on the earth and someday some surviving thing will eat the grass that grows on the ashes That once were us. But nothing, but no one will have a memory of us. The earth will be empty of us. There will be cockroaches and beetles and flies. There will be ants and termites. Rats, surely there will be rats. Maybe some fish. But every brilliant sunset will go unremarked. Every dawn will just be the earth turning and the sun will just be star and no one will be blinded by it. Everything will be nameless. No child will run down a deep dirt road kicking up a whirlwind of trouble. All that we have written, all that we have painted, all that we have sculpted, all that we have danced, all that we have sung all will be gone. No memory, no memorial. No future civilization. When we are gone it ends with us. It ends. It Is empty. It is a plain, a forest, an ocean, a rolling sphere, cradling life, because it is irrepressible. because it renews itself, re-invents itself. It has no need of us. It is indifferent to us. We are something only to ourselves and when ourselves no longer exist, all of humanity will vanish. All of humanity from the beginning of human time to the end of human time, will vanish. The trace of us will be in what is not there that was there before our coming, before our destroying, before our destruction But not one single living thing, neither beast nor bird nor reptile Nor cockroach will note the evidence and who among the dogwood and palms, and which blade of grass will comprehend the loss?
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