We are working to purify the herd,
and our tail-hair tests say
now 99.+++% have cowless chromosomes.
Once in a South Dakota national park,
from all the bison there, only two
were found to be pure in heart and gene.
We work our way back to Eden
through laboratories and computers
and human plans. Once we even began
to build a big tower to tidy the world up.
We busy ourselves at our efforts yet
even as Henslow’s sparrow
and the sandpiper still stiff-step
and tweet all over the place,
and the cows and bison just keep
chewing their cud, though they tend
to panic when we try
to round them up.