Synthesist Robert Rich – best known for his ambient music – has been experimenting with video poetry.

He describes After Us as a ‘video koan’, meditating on the life force, evolution, and our own extinction.

via rrichamoeba:

After Us:

I dreamt of the earth after us,
as mountains erode and the sun expands,
as time helps the cities crumble.

So easy to think that the earth revolves around us,
that after us the planet stops.
We, who can change the weather.

When we have made our world so inhospitable we can’t survive,
evolution crawls blindly forward, and consciousness revives, organisms organize,
and the cells of the earth join together to create new minds.

Small lives build new worlds,
cast a net across the surface, and through layers below,
a web of constant construction, destruction, erosion, rebuilding.

After us, on a scaffolding of rust and ashes, salt and sand,
digesting through it, stumbling numbly, vagabond life
picks through the detritus and continues unconcerned.

© 2012 by Robert Rich