Tag Archives: poem about pollution

Payback Rhythms: For Weekend Writing Prompt

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Payback Rhythms

The rhythm of the world as it tears us all asunder:

 hurricane and fire, rain and wind and thunder.

Landslides, ashes, ruins waterlogged and crumbled—

all advances of mankind finally have tumbled.

Listen to the beating of the fist of fate.
Agamemnon’s coming. We haven’t long to wait.
Everything we do is done right back to us.

This scientific fact is not so nebulous.

This is an Extract from an earlier poem, rewritten to meet the rules of:  Weekend Writing Prompt: Rhythm

Procrastination

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Procrastination

The imminent future seems iffy at best.
The door to tomorrow reveals a dark test.
Have we rationed our resources, saved for tomorrow?
Will deviations from reason cause future sorrow?
Spatially crowded, our cities all choke
in the fumes of their progress—nature’s cruel joke.
We write words like ECOLOGY large, in italics,
hope it will protect like the arms of a calyx,
think it will create a healing reaction,
and yet it will not, ’til we put it in action.

 

Today’s prompt words from six different sites are imminent, door, spatial, ration, deviation and italics.

Parasite

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Parasite

Mankind has been no bargain. They’ve scorched the living earth,
determined to exploit it to improve their worth.
Bargaining for diamonds, drilling for fossil fuels—
with each new excavation, proving they are fools.

They release noxious gases into the atmosphere,
and with each new admonition, shift to a higher gear.
Who will console our children as they forge ahead
following our example after we are dead?

We leave them with a dying world, and who is to blame?
First, off, those politicians who see it as a game
to increase their power in spite of consequences,
building up their war toys, strengthening defenses.

Extending greedy fingers, needing ever more.
Selling off our future, profiting from war.
While the wise men warn us, who in power listens?
Too busy filling pockets with everything that glistens.

 

Prompt words today are: fossil, scorch, gas, console, example and bargain.

Scourge of the Universe

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Scourge of the Universe

The blood of crushed magnolias stains the universe,
mankind ruining everything it chooses to traverse.
Leaving bloody footprints and the litter of our lives,
we exploit everything we see and kill all that survives.
Why can’t we learn to live in peace, preserving leafy bowers?
What single other species is as ornery as ours?

 

Prompts for the day are ornery, universe, magnolia, stain.

The Graffiti Artist

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Graffiti Artist

Such errands as having to go to the store
to get milk for one’s mother can be a big bore.
Then I spot a blank wall that alters my view
of what I’ve been sent to the corner to do.

My mind shifts a cog and memory grows faint
as I forget the milk and instead buy spray paint.
I’ve abandoned my purpose and lost my perspective
to scrawl on the wall these words of invective.

It’s not that my sentiments are hocus-pocus.
It’s simply that I have shifted my focus.
I don’t prevaricate, for though they’re ruthless,
let it not be said that my statements are truthless.

What some see as defacement, others see as art,
but this is never my goal from the start.
When I have a thought, I just want to share it.
Some put it on T-shirts and then choose to wear it,

but I want it bigger. I have to shout.
My feelings require a wall to get out!
So please look at the message and if you must blame
someone for graffiti, just look at the name

of the politician that I am exposing
for graft and corruption or lying or posing.
He’s the real villain. I’m only the one
who’s revolting with spray paint instead of a gun!!!

Prompt words for today are prevaricate, focus, abandoned, scrawl and perspective. All photos of graffiti thanks to Unsplash. Used with permission.

Stating the Obvious

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Stating the Obvious

Though we make new resolutions for this fresh year that’s been born,
let no laurel wreaths be woven, our foreheads to adorn.
Renewing hope won’t work unless we also prove our worth
by stemming global warming by cleaning up our earth.
By curbing population growth and making room for all
of nature’s other species on this great blue ball.
If we have learned nothing from past foibles, then I fear
there’ll be no improvement over our last dreadful year.

Prompt words for this first day of the new year (Yay!) are fresh, adorn, resolution and renew. Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash. Used with permission

Christmas Cancelled!!!

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Christmas Cancelled!!!

Lower the pinãta. Bring the party to a halt.
Cease your roar of protest, for I’m not the one at fault
for curbing your frivolity and quashing all our fun.
If you need a scapegoat, Father Christmas is the one
who turned Rudolph out to pasture and retired his sleigh to blocks.
while Gaea, Christ and Santa Claus have some major talks.
The Christ child won’t be crowned this year. The elves are on vacation.
Santa will stay a figment of your imagination.
The only Santas left are those “Ho ho” ing for their wages.
St. Nicholas gave up the ghost when we put kids in cages.

He sold off Donner and Blitzen when we turned our backs
on nature’s other creatures: the elephants and yaks.
All the endangered creatures in the forest and the seas,
those crippled by pollution, global warming and disease.
He closed up his workshop as we squandered nature’s gifts,
deserted the North Pole as the glaciers formed their rifts.
Now bad boys won’t get presents and, alas, the good ones either.
We’re being banished to our rooms while nature takes a breather.
Will Christmas come another year? I guess we’ll wait and see.
Next year will we be perched on or turned over Santa’s knee?

Prompt words for today are crown, roar, fault and figment.

November 3

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November 3

Since we first crept out of the primordial slime,
evolving from a past when our words were only mime,
since the time we clothed ourselves in dresses and in britches,
we took our world for granted–its beauties and its riches.

We’ve jeopardized our future by burning fossil fuels,
courted war and pestilence, led on by greedy fools.
How do we show our gratitude for all nature’s provision?
We frack and turn, pollute and burn to fuel the world’s division.

Blind to impending disaster, we rush foolishly on,
letting those we’re led by continue with their con.
Buoyantly, we bob along, soothed by drugs and boozing,
not realizing all the ills in life are of our choosing.

What will it take to stem the tide? Who will arrive to lead us?
Who will heal our ravaged Earth, restore our souls and feed us?
Will this be an election that brings us ’round the bend
or will it just propel us more quickly to our end?

 

Image by Ella Evanescu on Unsplash. Used with permission. Prompt words for the day are impending, jeopardize, creep, buoyant, gratitude and slime.

Off Course

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Off Course

For those who cannot fathom the changes time has wrought,
tomorrow will be better, or perhaps it will be not.
Those who have championed progress, thinking it is for our betterment
might come at last to fathom that it’s been to our fetterment.
Why do we study science and waste our time at college
only to find out that we’ve been ruined by our knowledge?
We have been so quickly smart and sadly too late wise.
All our grand inventions seem to lead to our demise.
Can we make things better? Can we veer off to the light?
Or will we blindly keep our course, attracted to the night?

The word prompts today are: better, tonight, champion, fathom and college.

Bird Chorus

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and came closer to the bait

Bird Chorus

Birds perch on countless branches, each a separate bell
ringing out the cadence of stories they must tell.
Around them, eerie silence, for no other sounds compete.
No calls of children playing. No pattering of feet

up and down the pavement. No playing girls and boys,
for all the busy humans, infamous for their noise,
are staying in their houses and no amount of blustering
from their scattered leaders is bound to stop their clustering.

Families draw in closer as friends all fade away
into their particular intentions for the day.
Offices turn cyber. Schools are merely screens.
Mothers sit at kitchen tables, perusing magazines.

Fathers pace on carpets and worry about money.
How are they to make it now that the world’s gone funny?
Now and then, the silence split open by a bell
tolling for the human race who haven’t done too well

at going with the scheme of things. They prefer to take over,
making malls and parking lots out of fields of clover.
Trashing up the landscape. Peppering the tide
with their plastic mountains grown too big to hide.

Is it any wonder how nature responds?
We’ve held her prisoner long enough. She’s sloughing off her bonds.
She’s given us broad hints, but still we do not mind her.
So she’s erasing her mistakes and putting us behind her.

 

Prompt words today are countless branches, amount, eerie, infamous and bell.