Extinction
Imagine dark.
Forty years' rain.
The sinking ark.
No dogs bark
or doves complain
in the long dark.
No eel or shark
noses in vain
the ribs of the ark.
No star, no spark.
No full or wane.
Silence and dark.
Without mark,
without stain,
bright, stark,
the ocean's arc
is bare again
above the dark,
the sunken ark.
__________________
Ursula K. Le Guin
Collected Poems
The Library of America, 2023
edited by Harold Bloom
"Extinction" was first published by Longhouse in 2007
in Ursula K. Le Guin's foldout booklet Four Different Poems
reprinted here in the new The Library of America volume
Photograph by Theo Downes-Le Guin
