Love Into Extinction

 ON ANOTHER PANEL ABOUT CLIMATE, THEY ASK ME TO SELL THE FUTURE AND ALL I’VE GOT IS A LOVE POEM

Written by Ayisha Siddiqa

Listen

What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind that there is no end to us in sight.

Whole cities breathe and bad luck is bested by a promise to the leaves.

To withstand your own end is difficult.

The future frolics about, promised to no one, as is her right.

Rage against injustice makes the voice grow harsher yet.

If the future leaves without us, the silence that will follow will be an unspeakable nothing.

What if we convince her to stay?

How rare and beautiful it is that we exist.

What if we stun existence one more time?

When I wake up, get out of bed, my seven year old cousin

with her ruptured belly tags along.

Then follows my grandmother, aunts, my other cousins
and the violent shape of their drinking water.

The earth remembers everything,
our bodies are the color of the earth and we
are nobodies.

Been born from so many apocalypses, what’s one more?

Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.

But for what it’s worth, I’d do this again.
Gamble on humanity one hundred times over

Commit to life unto life, as the trees fall and take us with them.

I’d follow love into extinction.

I confess I am caught/snatched by many of the lines of this poem, not to mention being sucked in by the title. The questions posed are breathtaking and require a long pause over each one.

Overall I am feeling something like hope in the midst of desperation and vivid descriptions of desperate circumstances. Yet somehow following an eternal thread of love weaves and remains.

Isn’t this the subtext and overstory to all life’s challenges? Do we not take our fears and anxieties and bombard the future with doom instead of summoning love? We weaponize so much; what is love as a weapon of revenge against violence? Besides an irreverent thought!

But then again, there is that radical notion of beating swords into plowshares…

To simply rest with the notion that the “future is soft” not to mention that it extends into a perpetuity like a horizon we cannot touch and merely gaze upon is, to me, blessed reassurance and empowering. 

I challenge myself this day to “stun existence”! I take that at least to mean to step outside common preoccupation and cast a wager/prayer into the mystery.  That becomes the breath which carries us in love, spreading love, always, until extinction or extinguished.