My name is Podrigotuma and one of the reasons I love poetry is because you could say in a certain

sense that most, if not all poems, are a certain reflection on time. What happened then? How am I

thinking about it now? How do I imagine I reflect on that in the future? Over and over again in

poetry time is that it's work and paying attention to time and a poem is one of the ways that we can

open up to its great gifts.

Species by Tishani Doshi

When it is time, we will herd into the bunker of the earth to join the lost animals.

Pig-footed Bandicoot, giant sea snail, woolly mammoth, no sound of chainsaws,

only the soft swish, swish of dead forests, pressing our heads to the lakes floor, a blanket of leaves

to make fossils of our femurs and last subbers. In a million years they will find and restore us

to jungles of Kapok, their children will rally to stare at ancestors, Neanderthals and caves with

paintings of the Gnu period, Papa, Homo erectus, forever squatting over the thrill of fire,

their bastard offspring with prairie-sized mandibles, stuttering over the beginnings of speech,

and finally, us, diminutive species of Homo, not so wise, with our weak necks and robo-lovers

our cobalt speckled lungs. Will it be for them as it was for us impossible to imagine oceans

where there are now mountains? Will they recognise their own story in the feather-tailed dinosaur

stepping out of a wave of extinction to trade over blooms of algae never once thinking about

asteroids or microbial stew? If we could communicate, would we admit that intergalactic

colonisation was never a sound plan? We should have learned from the grass, humble in its abundance,

offering food and shelter wherever it spread. Instead, we stamped our feet like gods marvelling

at the life we made, imagining all of it to be ours.

I love science fiction and I loved the imagination of this poem, imagining some kind of museum

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