Sunday, September 19, 2010

ENDANGERED SPECIES

Editor's note: "Down through the ages, species have lingered awhile, then disappeared -- often being victims of their own folly," Dad wrote as the introduction to this poem.My hope is that someday soon we learn the error of our ways!

A hundred million years ago,
Give or take a week or so,
Lived the Brontosaurus;
It isn't logical to think
Man caused him to be extinct,
For he was long before us!

We are told the larger ones
Weighed as much as thirty tons,
A mass of bone and muscle;
He was such an awesome beast,
Adequate, to say the least,
To give any foe a tussle.

Being such a massive thing,
It surely took a lot to bring
Him down, but then, I wonder
If perhaps it might have been
A little bug that did him in,
A germ that laid him under.

Maybe, if we knew the score,
We wouldn't wonder anymore,
On matters appertaining;
Those critters found, I wouldn't doubt,
A way to wipe each other out,
Till there were none remaining.

Our race may disappear, somehow,
And others, many years from now,
May guess what happened to it;
They may surmise we found the means
To blow ourselves to smithereens,
And were stupid enough to do it!

--The Buckeye Poet (1991)

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