LAMENTATION TO THE TREES

Oh my heart! Even while I sit here
planet-wide, the devastation rolls on.
Vast tracts of virgin forestry (from what’s left)
massacred every minute, in every land:
farmland for cattle and wheat
mono-cultured oil palm plantations, housing and industry.
Quick-turnover timber, underpinned by pharma’s pets:
herbicides, fertilisers, destroying all creaturely interaction and diversity.
In a generation or two the soil will be dead or washed away
and mammalian lungs carbon poisoned.

Which is the least of it.
The earth can shake us off like a cloud of gnats.
And in our absence the lifeless moonscapes of sterility we invent
might recover, if we are not tipped beyond a point of no return
rollercoasting exponentially to extinction;
our beloved Eden home.

Once upon,
the people knew the earth was a living
self-sustaining and repairing system
innovative through cataclysm and mutation.
It was a goddess of wisdom, a creature of power
and every life-form intrinsic.
Forests and mountains, Beings in their own right
nurtured and cherished by the elements, alive with identity and meaning.

Now, not just the air but space itself
becomes a refuse and noxious cess-pit;
the womb of rock and earth, a radioactive and toxic hell
no one can run from;
and the oceans - our pristine mother,
clogged and polluted with plastic and dying creatures
right to their subatomic core.

The nightmare prophecies of sci-fi come true.
The nightmare prophecies of every faith
rise up with ghastly verisimilitude
- the monster we ourselves create, then blithely feed fat
with our further folly and greed.