Every Eden’s Armageddon

That from such a Paradise

Of admiration should spring

Such wonders of affliction,

John Smith wrote of Bermuda

Some four hundred years ago,

As Englishmen, rats, and snakes

Overran indigenous

Species on the formerly

Uninhabited islands—

Uninhabited, that is,

By humans, and thus, perhaps,

The only genuinely

New World, wild and primeval,

Europeans discovered

Across the North Atlantic.

Settlers made short work of that,

And biogeographers

Can cite many cases since

Of islands where extinctions

Swept through in the wake of ships,

Shipwrecks, sailers, and settlers.

Let’s spare a thought for those rats,

And the Polynesian rats,

And the rats being driven

By determined poisonings

To death on far-flung islands

Even as we form these lines.

This is the epic of rats,

Epic for rat bards to sing—

Or, if you prefer, of snakes,

Heroic snakes who explored

The islands of paradise,

Snakes who dared to stowaway,

Who took their chances and thrived

In places no snakes had been.

Earth not only turns, it churns,

And some day paradises

Of islands of rats and snakes

Who only fear each other

May find themselves afflicted

By unpredicted wonders,

Hungers shipwrecked on hunger.