The Colour of Extinction

Publishing as an industry is obsessed with new – books yet to come out… but what about the brilliant books that have already been published? Each month we spotlight a different author whose book was published more than a year ago, which you might be yet to meet… This month we hear from S.C. Flynn about the brilliant The Colour of Extinction…

Shuffling the Shelves: The Colour of Extinction by S.C. Flynn

WRITING THE WORLD AFTER US

When I began writing The Colour of Extinction, I was trying to understand what it means to live in a world where the future has already started without us. The book grew out of a simple realisation: the Earth will continue, with or without our participation, and poetry is one of the few forms that can hold that truth.

Writing these poems meant shifting scale; instead of the human lifespan, I had to think in terms of geological time, evolutionary time and the patience of deserts. I found myself drawn to creatures and landscapes that embody endurance: gulls adapting to cities, termites building magnetic cathedrals, ancient microbial domes quietly exhaling oxygen. These are not metaphors, but rather the world’s memory.

If the book has a single question, it is this: what does it mean to be temporary in a place that is ancient? The poems do not offer comfort, but they do offer perspective. We are not the centre of the story, but a chapter, and not the final one.

Writing the world after us is a way of paying attention to the world while we are still here. That is the hope that my collection embodies.

Inheritance

Under a sky the colour of extinction
you choose your own conclusion.
The earth might have already done so:
somewhere in its whirling mass of DNA 
and infinite genetic possibilities 
is the clue to what will replace us.
Perhaps an existing creature will evolve,
switching on latent capabilities
that have lain dormant for millennia,
or the distant descendants of extremophiles
currently clustered around hypothermal vents
and suspended from the roofs of caves
will develop in unimaginable ways.
But then again, maybe once is enough
and the world will embrace equality
with no striding master or dictator,
and ten thousand years of civilisation
will shrink to an unrepeated moment.

v
Abandoning the Iceberg

And can you tell me what it’s all about,
this endless jumping on and off the world?
The skuas, whales and seals have all turned back
and the penguins found refuge on an ice floe.
This is how a species dies out,
when all the rest abandon ship,
while the slow or stubborn stay on board,
fading away in slow fatigue.
A while ago I felt the cold,
but now I don’t feel much of anything.