It’s Never Too Late

(a sestina for the planet)

One million species at risk of extinction —

This the fate of so many who deserve our protection and love

Like the horned lizards of my native Texas nearly gone

The ones we called horny toads and held gently in our tiny hands

Or the golden toad of Monteverde I went searching for a few years too late

Hope postponing the burden of mourning a dying planet.

So strange those photos of Earth from space, to think of home as a floating planet

So peculiar to measure life by geological epochs—Cretaceous, Paleogene— and chronicle time by extinction

It all seems so predetermined, destined to be too late

I protect my heart with little sayings from great minds like William Blake, whose words I love

He said to hold heaven in the palm of your hand —

Where have all the wise ones gone?

I don’t know how to feel when I learn entire species are forever gone

I don’t know what it means to view Earth at a distance, like an uninhabited planet

To see home as if a marble small enough to fit in the palm of my hand

To see a photo of a golden toad as if taken this afternoon, but know of its extinction

To know I should only feel love

But am obsessed with feeling too late.

With many of my own family I am the one left behind, the one arriving late

So many I’ve cherished long gone

Leaving me here with untethered love

I feel so alone sometimes on this planet

My heart at risk of extinction

I need simple things, like air, water, to hold someone’s hand.

Yet it’s Homo sapiens dexterous hands

That created this obsession with time running out, running late

That made fossil fuels from Nature’s burial mounds of past extinctions

That dig and dig until all is nearly gone

We balance now on a fulcrum, us against the planet

Layers of time that can’t be replayed, no matter the depths of our love.

We need a new morality, to leverage with love

Not with what we grasp with our hands

It doesn’t matter what we think of the planet

It doesn’t matter if we imagine it is too late

It even doesn’t matter what is already gone

It only matters what we do for the million facing extinction.

Because of love, it’s not too late

The million are not yet gone

We hold the planet’s fate in our hands

and must avoid their extinction.