The Young People

After all the children died
And the distraught young parents
Gave up trying to have more,

The focus of the species
Became inventing a way
To make surviving babies

By any technology,
Any means necessary.
But the decades kept rolling

In heartbreak and no success,
And the population fell
So swiftly the tech collapsed,

And the largest contingent
Of living humans on Earth
Were those still in their sixties

Who had been the young people
Who had borne the brunt of loss
And found themselves with no one

Following them and fewer
And fewer living ahead.
Still, they grasped at each other,

And they grasped at each rumor
That someone conceived a child,
Somewhere, somehow, a future.