Luck’s a Builder Unimpressed by Artifice

Ah well, the delicate existence
Of exquisitely non-living things
Like poetry, cloth, and pottery.

A library’s no different than dung
To the climate and geology
That may or may not chance to save it.

Some small bones vomited by a fish
In a warm Devonian ocean
Endured by statistical fortune.

The elegant writing on mud bricks
Was preserved thanks to its qualities
As mud. Mourn the papyrus copies,

But even baked clay takes its chances.
Most splendid urns crumbled to fragments,
And most of those shards ended as dust.

Of textiles there’s scarcely anything
Wasn’t deposited in a tomb,
And most of those tombs were soon looted.

Ok, so a great many such things
From tombs to linen to papyrus,
To clay jars stuffed with bark-paper scrolls,

To burned, buried, mud-brick libraries,
To fish vomit and dinosaur dung,
Have outlasted billions of humans.

The ends of things aren’t as circumscribed
As the ends of lives. Still, endurance
Heaps coincidence for pyramids.