Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, includingThe Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which was long listed for the National Book Award. She served as a Chancellorof the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017. This poem strikes as both pre-cataclysmic and hopeful. What a reader finds in a poem is often a mirror, both of the person who is looking and listening and of the particular weather of that particular moment of listening. The poem is, without question, dark: It imagines the judgment of us, of this time, that would come from those who live in a future made by our failures. But it’s also a poem trying to undo its own need to exist. The repetition, over and over of “Let them not say”… the poem’s hope lives in that phrase, midway as it is between prayer and command. If you can still say “Let them not say,” the future is still malleable. The poem also holds a certain tenderness toward our human frailty. We like to be warm. We like to read at night. We like to praise.