Vanishing Point

Kathryn Jones

February 25, 2024

At what moment will the last one die?

The Golden-Cheeked Warbler every day loses

more habitat to chainsaws and bulldozers

but still trills in oak tree branches.

Sea turtles, Whooping Cranes, Monarch butterflies 

teeter on the edge of oblivion but still 

they migrate on epic sky trails, mate, lay eggs, 

raise young, demonstrate their will to survive. 

Where is the justice for their existence?

When the last one dies, if that day comes, 

will anyone hear the thud or notice the silence?

Only the rivers and mountains and deserts listen and weep –

When a bird goes extinct, singing no more in forest cathedrals,

the butterfly floats to the ground, wings stiff as paper,

humans may glimpse their own vanishing point –

there on the horizon, where all trails converge and disappear.

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.