True Patriot

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries
We have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life
Within decades we must close our eyes again
Isn't it a noble and enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun
To work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born
The potential people who could have been here in my place
But who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara
Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton
We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA
So massively exceeds the set of actual people
In the teeth of those stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here
We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds
How dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state
From which the vast majority have never stirred?

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers
Having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one
And that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity
From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been
And are being, evolved.