Exiling the Earth Poem by Duane Ackerson

First, we sent away the trees,
then the bubble of breath
they had long exhaled,
itself drifting off,
a large blue balloon
getting smaller and smaller
as the sky shrank away from us
to a pinprick that itself went out.
For a while,
those who could afford it
lived on bottled water, canned air,
and videos of sky, sea, and earth,
till, finally, none could afford
even these surrogates for life.
Little by little,
with nothing to ground them,
those few still left became
greater and greater
strangers to themselves.
When we were all gone,
we learned that the stories
about ghosts were true;
we survived, haunting the old places
that themselves were barely
memories of themselves,
reciting lists of all the varieties
of bush and bird,
tree and cloud,
that were no more.
Now perhaps we will discover
how long a ghost can hang onto
the ghost of a memory.