Allowed As Long As You Don’t Get Out

And if Earth is a lazaretto
Among the stars, would you wonder, then

At the loneliness and the silence?
Well, humans, where else would you be from?

No, you were all born to this planet.
You’re children of the lazaretto.

But life itself, Earth’s cruel kind of life,
May have been placed for observation

To see how its patterns might turn out.
Four billion years of silence suggest

It’s not going well. The first you hear
From the universe may be the last.