Requiem

Kurt Vonnegut, who was born on 11 November 1922 and died on 11 April 2007, ended A Man without a Country (Seven Stories Press, 2005), his last book, with this poem (p. 137):

Requiem

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.