If I Only Could By Jakub Rozalski

If I only could… by Jakub Rozalski

Achille Mourant - Dying Achilles. 1789. Jean Baptiste Giraud. French 1752-1830. marble.   http://hadrian6.tumblr.com

Melissa Febos, Abandon Me

In this quiet place I cry over the empty tomb of my regrets...

Thereupon I think, why do I then cry, when the tomb is empty?

One look around reminds me

that too many in this world

will never be even as alive as those here wandering ghosts.

The barbed stake again twisting in my soul.

Should I be grieving at a different stone?

Or perhaps the dread of living with those destroying your mind and soul,

yet they are there, ominous,

impeling you alone to fill this empty grave;

the loneliness, the rage,

the grim apathy, the whispers repressed, that you are but a slave.

Emily Yvonne

Worse, thanks to what is called “shifting baseline syndrome,” changes that initially seem extreme come to be accepted as normal over time. The next generation of children, who will never remember how many birds (or butterflies or hedgehogs or manatees) once existed in the wild, will not hear anything eerie in the silence. Once a mass murder is complete, its victims tell no tales. When humans killed the last of the giant “Steller sea cows” several hundred years ago, the memory of these mega-manatees faded away quickly, and now they seem like something fantastical. We know that “in just over 100 years the world lost as much forest as it had in the previous 9,000 years,” but when nobody is left alive who remembers the old forests, the loss is not felt.

Nathan J. Robinson, Obliterating the Natural World