Dominion

Dear God, if you can imagine us, Man,
Without a chainsaw in our hands or the gun
Or looking away from the prices on the screen
For half a minute, even then in that
Even by you perhaps unimaginable state
The truth is we’re not good enough, never were,
Never will be, we’re not fit, we don’t fit in,
Nothing will live with us except the viruses
And dogs and lice, nothing likes us down here,
Everything else is subtler, finer, fitter than us.
Take a coral reef: we come visiting
It gives up the ghost, it’s a boneyard by morning,
Spectral groves. And that’s us all over,
The ashes, the fallout, whatever we come near
Even in white, with a gauze over the gob,
We’re the kiss of death. Dear God, that day
In Eden when you made Adam boss
What a catastrophe, even you must see it by now,
Anything would have been better than us,
A dodo, for example, a booby, a diplodocus.