Some Generations Poem by Diane Furtney

"Settlements away from Earth: I'm not sure the human race
has the right to propagate itself that far. We might not
deserve to go on."

But we are young, just some generations
from the white winds and little, worked stones

of the Pleistocene.
And we have time. At fourteen

billion years, the universe is crisp
and fresh, we've changed down to the grist

and have immensities
of more green time for change. It may be

one of your descendants—deft,
confident, reliable in emotional depth,

able at seventy to learn Chinese
or Navajo in just three weeks,

seriously ill maybe twice
in a two-hundred-year life, spliced

with braking genes to inhibit,
a little, our recidivist

midbrain conflicts and maladaptive
selfishness; better, then, at love

but incomplete still, like all
the sprawling future—who will

discover, say, more dimensions
in non-baryonic matter, their alterations

tumbling and pretty and the result of interaction
with the organic; or some station

of other knowledge that shows
our every summation of life and growth

was based on a scarcity
of variables and too little time. It may be

a child of your child, beautiful,
whose face will grow still

thinking of humanity now, so sweet
and terrible, of our desperate

or patient persistence at efforts
we thought might be pointless, vain, but

continued through every new refrain
of pleasure or loneliness or pain.

From SCIENCE AND, FutureCycle Press, Copyright © 2014 Diane Furtney
Reprinted 2014, Stand Magazine, University of Leeds, United Kingdom