The Last Tribe on Earth

It’s hard to imagine, now,
the hardships they endured
to get this far — those who got
this far, still not far enough
to outdistance the cannibals’
marbled orbs, pallid and childlike,
the nightmares of ad hoc abattoirs
besetting like blight and fog,
the upright and tailing smell
of disease, pinch of hunger,
and death, so many that
May Death come to you
became a felicitation —
but far enough
to survive, those who survived,
less like a choice
with each nightfall and sunrise,
requiring neither
apology nor reason;
they were simply
proof of a primal idea
even if joy was absent
in those jagged mornings
with dust wiggling inside chests
and abscesses visible and within.
There was so little beauty,
and warmth was wealth.
But there was movement,
always movement,
a form of expression
containing the possibility
of grace. There were seeing
eyes and calculations
of intent, which meant there
could be desire, and sorrow,
and in the narrowest of margins,
a needle of sentiment
like a single sprout of moss.
During the interminable winters
they took turns huddling
and isolating the diseased,
nurturing the weak — the people
we were all slowly becoming.
In the congealed, sticky air of summer
there was conversation, exploration,
consideration of applications,
migration, and breeding —
what the elders called prayer
with action, giving reply
to the devil inside each.
There were nihilists who preached
humanity got what it deserved,
argued against propagation,
mumbling and self-declaiming
until they saw starvation
was teeth, and that it eats.
There were citizens who cradled faith
privately and silently
in the act of doing —
women and mothers, heroes
of untold stories.
There were hermits
who burrowed even after the skies
cleared, who denied light
as their forebears denied reason.
There were artists
who created a new genre of art
in the form of dying.
And there were poets, those who knew
there is poetry contained in glances
that cannot be carried by any word.
For a while, many years,
no one spoke of the children
who roved the premises
bug-eyed and walnut-faced;
it was difficult to love them,
those physical outcrops of our mistake,
harder still because we suspected
they would — those who could — grow up
to become our future,
reap rewards without
paying the horrors.
But it was unlawful to deny a child,
so the only neglect was silence
and a particular form of
aslant, inquisitive gaze.
And what of love?
We must admit it existed.
Through motions
that grew repetitive, less
fraught for the repetition,
love is sort of what sprung up,
first from the caretakers
in the form of a guileless touch,
then embedded into stories
amid the extraneous adjective,
and then amongst the rest of us
who stopped to point out a thing
not there before.
This period was called
The Exhumation,
relearning, digging up
old sayings like the one
about how it takes a village.
It was still not safe outside,
but in time the bandits,
murderers, and rapists
lost their motivations.
Loss
was the constant,
so reliable that rituals
to commemorate loss
lost their meanings.
Two generations or so later,
the tribe began losing
the very meaning of danger.
Only then were our stories recorded,
for only then was death resurrected,
eternal villain in the tales we tell.
Only then did children listen
with the intent of retelling.
They had scraped the bottom
but were now back on the up-
swing down the long tunnel
of history, unsure if gravity
pulled them toward destruction
or a new morning. On most nights
it was enough to look up and know
salvation, God’s first light,
was constant. But it is far.
To reach it, we have to burn
everything.