Domestic

Presented in classes and textbooks
Drily as description and some dates,
A handful of plants and animals,

A handful of locations, Asia,
Mesopotamia, Africa,
Central America, the Andes,

Maybe a little speculation,
And then on to civilization,
If it’s history, or out to modes

Of food production, varieties
Of kin, if it’s anthropology.
The subtle shift that’s torching the world,

This rupture named domestication,
The entraining in alliances
Of small bunchs of species

Starting mass extinctions in the rest,
And nobody who studies it knows why
Those places or why exactly then.

There’s one species at the core of it,
But it’s a selection to itself.
Suddenly, species that could be tamed

Into a cooperative knot
With the other self-domesticates
Would be, and those that couldn’t wouldn’t

Be much longer for this world at all.
To be tame became the way to win,
Grass behind fences, goats in a pen.

Without domestication, the great
Extinction would have never begun,
Nor our next, feral, revolution.