What will become of us?

I am in western New York for two more days,
with my parents. And last night I could hardly sleep,
which I blame entirely on my friend, Dave Huth.
No, I’m kidding. But a conversation with friends
had taken a dark turn, to the precarious state of
our world, to the disasters that could soon befall us, to
those that already have, time and again, in the harrowing
history of the world, to the difficulty of holding on to hope
in times so unjust and so uncaring, and I had the awful thought—
what if those stark teachings from my childhood
where God ends the world in fire, were in fact about us—
what if we end the world? What will become of us?

And then a new friend drove me home,
talking of stars and flying. In the black
night, we startled a line of deer, their eyes glowing
like tiny moons—they ran from us, afraid,
and later, on my ceiling,
a leggy spider gathered and swung
and somersaulted along an invisible web
as if afloat, or aloft on some tenuous strand
of hope. She did not fall, and I was glad, but
we are not as innocent as spiders, as deer, and
the question remained: what will become of us?

Sleepless, I went seeking poetry, and the anthology
had included a passage from Romans, so I brooded on that:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine,
or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
Shall war, or genocide, or poverty, or wealth, or consumption, or greed,
or apathy, or denial, or despair, or debt, or greenhouse gases, or the loss of this
good green world?
Nay, for I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor principalities, nor governments, nor disease, nor great disaster, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor
any other circumstance shall be able to separate us from the love of God.

I believe that this is true.
But I also hope and pray, how could I not?
that these present terrors cease,
that the others that threaten do not come to pass,
that we survive ourselves,
that we can live.

Rabbi Heschel once said:
Just to be is a blessing.
Just to live is holy.

I believe that this is true.
Yet I want so many things
from this sweet brief life
allotted to me—here is one such wish—
to stand next summer in Namibia
or my beloved Mondulkiri, in the wind
on a dark night
and see the stars clearly again.