[To] The Last [Be] Human - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jorie Graham is the author of a dozen collections of poetry, including The Dream of the Unified Field, which won the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between western France and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches at Harvard University. 

Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Poem

The earth said

remember me.

The earth said

don’t let go,

said it one day

when I was 

accidentally

listening, I

heard it, I felt it

like temperature,

All said in a 

whisper—build to-

morrow, make right be-

fall, you are not

free, other scenes

are not taking

place, time is not filled,

time is not late, there is

a thing the emptiness

needs as you need

emptiness, it 

shrinks from light again &

again, although all things

are present, a

fact a day a 

bird that warps the

arithmetic of per-

fection with its

arc, passing again &

again in the evening 

air, in the pre-

vailing wind, making no

mistake—yr in-

difference is yr

principal beauty

the mind says all the

time—I hear it—I

hear it every-

where. The earth

said remember

me. I am the 

earth it said. Re-

member me.

Tree

Today on two legs stood and reached to the right spot as I saw it

choosing among the twisting branches and multifaceted changing shades,

and greens, and shades of greens, lobed, and lashing sun, the fig that seemed to me the

perfect one, the ready one, it is permitted, it is possible, it is

actual. The VR glasses are not needed yet, not for now, no, not for this while

longer. And it is warm in my cupped palm. And my fingers close round but not too

fast. Somewhere wind like a hammerstroke slows down and lengthens

endlessly. Closer-in the bird whose coin-toss on a metal tray never stills to one

face. Something is preparing to begin again. It is not us. Shhh say the spreading sails of

cicadas as the winch of noon takes hold and we are wrapped in day and hoisted

up, all the ribs of time showing through in the growing in the lengthening

harness of sound—some gnats nearby, a fly where the white milk-drop of the

torn stem starts. Dust on the eglantine skin, white powder in the confetti of light

all up the branches, truth, sweetness of blood-scent and hauled-in light, withers of

the wild carnival of tree shaking once as the fruit is torn from its dream. Remain I

think backing away from the trembling into full corrosive sun. Momentary blindness

follows. Correction. There are only moments. They hurt. Correction. Must I put down

here that this is long ago. That the sky has been invisible for years now. That the ash

of our fires has covered the sun. That the fruit is stunted yellow mold when it appears

at all and we have no produce to speak of. No longer exists. All my attention is

free for you to use. I can cast farther and farther out, before the change, a page turned,

we have gone into another story, history floundered or one day the birds dis-

appeared. The imagination tried to go here when we asked it to, from where I hold the

fruit in my right hand, but it would not go. Where is it now. Where is this here where