By The Earth's Corpse

I      "O Lord, why grievest Thou? -      Since Life has ceased to be      Upon this globe, now cold      As lunar land and sea,     And humankind, and fowl, and fur      Are gone eternally,     All is the same to Thee as ere      They knew mortality." II     "O Time," replied the Lord,      "Thou read'st me ill, I ween;     Were all THE SAME, I should not grieve      At that late earthly scene,     Now blestly past - though planned by me      With interest close and keen! -     Nay, nay: things now are NOT the same      As they have earlier been. III      "Written indelibly      On my eternal mind      Are all the wrongs endured      By Earth's poor patient kind,     Which my too oft unconscious hand      Let enter undesigned.     No god can cancel deeds foredone,      Or thy old coils unwind! IV      "As when, in Noe's days,      I whelmed the plains with sea,      So at this last, when flesh      And herb but fossils be,     And, all extinct, their piteous dust      Revolves obliviously,     That I made Earth, and life, and man,      It still repenteth me!"