The Last Tribe on Earth

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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

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