The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement
of particles. Chaos claims all. People will disappear.
Meanwhile, feeble light traversing empty skies
reaches our eyes. Human action is free and stripped
of meaning. Good & evil are Victorian fictions, culled
from the past. All that exists is egotism. Cold, intent, radiant.
Though short-lived and vain, sex provides meager compensation.
Transcendence, invented by well-meaning drudges,
claims the uniqueness of the individual. What joy!
We remember our lives only a little better than we do
a novel we once read. Yet our species, barely different
from apes, carries within it noble aspirations.
O beat that drum, wistful hope, that something survives,
even if that something is not ourselves.
Geoffrey Young