No doubt we were a Dark Ages to you.  And paradoxically we had so much — for instance the millions of species we let go extinct on our watch.  Our ignorance, not least of our own wealth, was inexcusable.  Even the land mass we inhabited was luxurious compared with your deserts and reduced shorelines.  We enjoyed the relative security of fixed national boundaries before irresistible mass climigration rendered those borders irrelevant.  We fought over things we shouldn’t have — who we loved, how we identified, what we thought about God — while letting the super-rich rob us to the last penny.  Worst, though, was our willingness to let distractions prevent our seeing the real damage our way of life was doing to the planet as a habitat hospitable to our species, not to mention those countless other species to whom Earth belonged.  For that alone I fear our age will live in infamy as long as sentient beings dwell in the house of the universe.

(Dear future, I know you’re an abstraction,

that I’m in fact writing not to our imagined

descendants but to us here, now.

Indeed, we are the ones who need to read

this letter, not you, because without our

contrite and dedicated action,

there may be no “you.”  So I fold the pages

of my hope and grief into this envelope

and let it fall to the ground before reaching

a mailbox, on the chance that another

may pick it up, open it, read it, and

join with us in changing the present,

the only way we can change you, dear future.)

Thomas R. Smith lives in River Falls, Wisconsin. His latest poetry collection is Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications). For more by and about Thomas, find his author page at VolumeOne.org.