I Guess They Have To Go

Oh what a world to live in, what a world to see

Where freely floating plastic bags could be snowshoe hares running free. 

Across dead prairies of tire tread, around the stumps of every tree

Bound to the earth that’s been left for them, the emptied landscapes they cannot leave. 

Have you ever seen a painting or cut an artwork from its frame?

Have you smothered a roaring fire despite the beauty of its flame?

Have you ever seen our great gods running across their open roads?

And thought how fair and just the act to decide that they’re no more?

Perhaps it all won’t matter both if we have and what we’ve done.

I’m sure we’d like to think just once that you can’t blame us for what’s gone.

That the world is doomed to expansion, that life must bow to life.

That we are dying planets in the dark and will become the empty sky.

I wonder if we’ll be happy there, in a concrete box above the world

Where we sit with glass in hand and speak fondly of the pearls

Those fragments of impossible beauty at which we once sat and stared

Before the trees were nothing, before the fields fell, to hope there’s beauty in a world that now has been stripped bare.

I think we know the answer. I think we fear the mortal tone.

That for all our great expansions and every striding growth

We’ve written on the rising walls that we’ll now be here alone.