Replication and Cessation
Your parents had four children, grand-kids eight.
But as for great-grandchildren, they’ll have none.
How could this come to be? Was it just Fate?
Why would Nature, History, Civilization
Choose this hour to forsake this life, love, thought?
But who can blame the grand-kids? We’d have done
The same had we foreseen what this day’s wrought.
Can grand-dogs mitigate oblivion?
It’s contravened all human purpose now:
An empire prospered, flourished, now decays.
Noise and pain-laden self-absorption’s drowned
Will for thankless propagation. I pray
They’ll somehow bear old age: they wake forlorn,
Besieged by senseless solitude, stressed, scorned.
Kevin Farnham lives in Northeastern Connecticut (“The Quiet Corner”). His poetry has appeared in The Lyric Magazine. His book “Twelve Sonnets: A Defense of Spirit” is the beginning of a long sonnet sequence titled “The Autumn Sonnets.”
Kevin, you’ve named the root problem of self-absorption. A sad state. It does seem to account for much loss of will in the present hour. Still, I’m sitting here with a card from a former student, showing herself, her husband, and their nine beautiful children. The research does indicate one thing common to large contributors such as they. It’s faith. Keep up those spirited sonnets!
Thanks, Margaret. The future plight of the younger generation(s) glares at me specifically as I look at my own childless children and think about what their life/world will be like when they’re my age. This poem is part of a loosely-bound “Fertility Quintet” and previously the Society published my “Prodigious Dreams” sonnet. But, having entered my 70s now, it’s a topic I don’t plan to spend much time on in the future. As my wife says, “It’s their world now.”
Childhood and adolescence these days is traumatic. We like to think these ‘kids’ lack something we had. They lack blissful ignorance and a disregard of the fate of those beyond our shores. So why bring more kids into the world, especially when we’re destroying its viability and trying to convince ourselves we aren’t. Just ask the dodo, whose habitat was destroyed by Man, that was hunted by Man, and whose eggs and young were consumed by rats, another invasive species until it was extinct.
Alternatively, shoot the messenger or write a humorous poem on a dodo cookery recipe.
Paul, as I say in the poem: “We’d have done the same” (not have kids) “had we foreseen what this day’s wrought.” Nonetheless, what’s happening can’t be good for the future.