The Seventh Extinction

I miss the white-noise sea breeze through my hair, the smell of salt travelling inland and the waves – those waves, those porter-dark waves crashing against the rocks and cliffs. A cormorant flying overhead. A cormorant, great on the pier, drying off, wings aloft. A million cormorants Hallelujah poised in front of the industrial estate smokestacks rising up in the sky like the wings of humanity lifting up the world. The scraping of metal on metal in the trees, in the grass, in every breath of air. Everything a part of the machine; what machine? How did I get here? I reach down and listen for life in the fallen leaves and hear the scraping of metal on metal like always and everywhere. I stand, and choke on the bleak ashes-of-extinction wind.

A taxon with a cosmopolitan distribution lives everywhere on Earth. The rock dove is pandemic; the rock dove is everywhere, from those white-noise coast cliffs to the dregs of urbanity; New York, London, the Holy See. Tarns and gutters and valleys and alleys. In clarity and in decay. We fancied them our friends; we spat upon and shot them. Here, a crumb, for your digestion; go and lay upon your spikes. We cannot eradicate you like the passengers; no, though we say we would not mourn, coo, so we would, coo, and there are too many of you besides. Fly out of our sight and peck away at the morsels you get.

We are here in the cities and we are here in the deserts and here in the plains and streets of the towns. We are there in our trains across the sky and there in our lands beneath the sea. She, cross-braceleted, walked from Ireland to the English lakes and when she looked back – nothing but the praise-God Phalacrocoracidae. In those days, those distant days, the tide was an icy pond full of kings; in our nights, our remote nights, the refuse pile of the uranium age. 

Everywhere, then, becomes a monument to mankind. Look in our sky and see our towers and our grey-decay clouds. Look in our waste abyss and see our shipwrecks. Our burial mounds are sacral hills and baptismal fonts were always rivers. Is one more deserving of the drying of wings, or is all blessed, or all profaned? Death in the driver’s seat of a red-streaked white car can not answer the question of mortality; only sounds the sirens and keeps going. Call the world whatever you like. We know now that it does not fight back.