Declared Extinct 

Carolina parakeets no longer live
beside rivers in Kentucky or Tennessee
while electrical storms rage
at the heart of the Milky Way,
and Bachman’s warbler doesn’t breed
along the Gulf Coast in Alabama 
or winter in Cuba far from the noise
and chaos deep in the galaxy.
Its yellow belly and olive green 
back have not been seen since 1962. 
Its rapid series of buzz notes
has slipped into silence while
radio emissions kink through space
and black holes emit their own hum.

Oh, where is the bridled white-eye—
a bird just four inches long—
gone now from the forests of Guam?
Billions of galaxies still glow
like eggs or whirlpools of light,
but the frenzy of a hundred million 
stars won’t bring back the little 
Mariana fruit bat, also known
as the Guam flying fox, 
with its two-foot wingspan,
to the islands of Micronesia
where the brown tree snake goes
about its business seeking eggs
and nestlings now of other species.

While stars explode and black holes 
grow in galactic cores, mussels
vanish from rivers: the flat pigtoe,
southern acornshell, stirrupshell,
upland combshell, and all
the pearly blossom ones—green,
tubercled, turgid, or yellow—
with mantle flaps that look like
minnows, worms or flies to lure 
fish to spread the mussel larvae.
What do the exoplanets care?
Space has glowing filaments 
a hundred light-years long to form.
The universe can birth another
Earth someday and forfeit this one.

But what about hawksbill sea turtles
washing up on beaches all along
the Persian gulf, their bellies filled
with balloons and plastic foam?
Gold mining that pollutes waterways 
in the Amazon rainforest 
with mercury, and all the species
that succumb when oceans 
are mined for copper and nickel
for cellphones and computers?
The universe will take back 
the planet Earth someday with
all the orchids, ocelots and whales,
but for now it’s theirs and ours—
a watery orb a few light-years 
from Alpha and Beta Centauri
in a spiral arm of the Milky Way.

____________________________________

Lucille Lang Day is the author of four poetry chapbooks and seven full-length collections, most recently Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place. She is also the editor of Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery, coeditor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, and author of two children’s books and a memoir. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and eleven Pushcart nominations. She is the founder and publisher of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books.