Plastic, Pig’s Knuckles, and Lead

“Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207.”

Well, that’s Larkin done.

So much for broken “Untruth”

And the historical fact

A Victorian

Restoration carved the hands

That so bemused him. 

Wrong. And what is wrong

With that far future

Seamed with its nitrogen-rich

Layer of plastic,

Intermixed with the fossil bones

Of domesticated beasts

And spent isotopes

At the end of our decay?

Any descendants around

Of us or our swine,

Or of our machines

Come, at last, to their own minds,

Seem unlikely to complain

That their ancestors 

Were too disgusting for them

To want to survive

The shock of their origins.

Call it love, if anything,

If anything’s still alive.