Dystopian Doom
DYSTOPIAN DOOM
When cities have all devolved to rust
and nothing is left of diamonds but dust,
when there is no one left for you to trust,
The world will have passed away.
It has taken a thousand thousand Mays;
a countless stream of nights and days,
a planetary lifetime spent in selfish haze
with little enough being left to say.
There’s been war on this globe since before my birth.
Not one single day of peace for Mother Earth,
since mankind has always neglected her worth,
being born knowing no other way.
We choked her with poison pumped into air,
acid in her rain, from here to there,
soiled our own bed with hardly a care,
leaving us no place to stay.
Oh, we talk the talk when push comes to shove,
and do what we must in the name of self-love,
but when nuclear clouds block the sun above
we will be forced to deal with our decay.
Our science has stepped over ethical bounds,
giddy with glee over each discovery found,
and there are now so few philosophers around,
that this mongrel dog has wasted its day.
There is yet time to forestall our demise,
we need to be looking with Earth’s green eyes,
we can at least be careful if we cannot be wise,
or we can return to the dust and clay.
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©2014, 2024 Christopher Reilley
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Shared with those sci-fi lovers over at DVerse Poets.
Hi Ain here, stylistically v good verse.....though not sure ...the time may have passed...enjoyed, very
ReplyDeleteThis is so poignant.. I resonate with; "We choked her with poison pumped into air,
ReplyDeleteacid in her rain, from here to there soiled our own bed with hardly a care." Thank you so much for adding your voice to the prompt 💜💜
You have spelled it out very clearly. Seems we never learn and that my be our demise! Well done.
ReplyDeleteI wonder when the time will come that dystopian doom becomes reality. I hope I’m not around to witness it. You’ve evoked that feeling of doom so well in this poem Christopher. I like the rhyme scheme, which at first seems jaunty, until the fourth line of each stanza, which kind of jolts us into the truth of the matter. These lines hit especially hard:
ReplyDelete‘We choked her with poison pumped into air,
acid in her rain, from here to there,
soiled our own bed with hardly a care’
and
‘but when nuclear clouds block the sun above
we will be forced to deal with our decay.’
I would love to see mother earth through green eyes but alas, we have done so much damage. I fear we will return to dust and clay very soon. Love the message Christopher.
ReplyDeleteIt is so tragic when we all know what to do... but we don't just staying complicit. The meta-crisis is so much more though, all those issues piling on top of each other... how can we do to untangle the web we are caught in.
ReplyDeleteChris, I feel gravity and the earnestness in your poem. I pray the energy of it reaches every single person on the planet in some form and engines them to action for life, not war's way of annihilation.
ReplyDelete