Tag Archives: poem about pollution

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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IMG_2737

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.

Equal to the Challenge?

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Equal to the Challenge?

Whereas  the stage of life for folks my age is likely terminal,
the young are at a stage that is best described as germinal.

They boomerang through life, it seems, from one thing to another—
from party girl to partner, to wife and then to mother.

Their progress through this life is one that we have laid the ground for.
Where we have already been is likely where they’re bound for.

Those obstacles that soured us are ones we hope they’ll solve.
I guess that is the means by which humans must evolve.

War, disease and famine, global warming through pollution—
 we set up each problem. Will they create the solution?

Prompt words today are boomerang, terminal, young, sour and progress.

Once by Ice and Once by Fire

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Once by Ice and Once by Fire

Once by ice and now by fire, erasing her mistakes,
Mother Earth must wonder how many times it takes
to finally get the world planned right, for once the lot is cast,
how can she watch sufficiently  a planet that’s so vast?

Her hope is that but rarely she must resort to extinction
to control a species risen to such great distinction
that it uses up more resources than it can provide.
How many times must she restore a planet that has died?

She casts a might yawn and then breathes fire once again—
cancelling out excesses that they can’t see as sin.
Caught in a clinch as they resist all means of education,
perhaps the only answer is mankind’s eradication.

 

IMG_0970 (1)

 

Prompt words today are extinct, rarely, clinch, vast and hope.

3030

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Photo by Ria Puskas on Unsplash. Used with permission

3030

Today we all breathe easy in our kingdom by the sea,
wondering how much longer the air will still be free.
We’ve heard the air is sickening and folks will have to pay
to buy it in large cylinders one not-too-distant day.
It’s best that people stockpile their air just like their water
for that upcoming day when our weather will get hotter
and we will have to stay secure within our houses
and purchase air and water for our children and our spouses.
Machines will roam our world for us. We think it will be best.
They’ll do all our shopping and play golf at our behest.
We’ll tuck away our bodies and exercise our minds
as we simply view the world outside from behind our blinds.
The reality show outside will be one that we all view
once the air and water is not safe for me and you!!

 

Photo by Fred Rivett on Unsplash. Used with permission.

Prompt words today are breathe, best, kingdom, confidence and think.

Tomb

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This picture is taken from my upstairs terrace. The dome you see covers the ceiling of my bedroom.
Our children follow in our footsteps
Creating their legacy

Tomb

Every tactless comment, every lurid lie
pollutes the world around us—the water and the sky.
Rude winds disturb the quiet with cacophonous shrieking.
From floods and fires and hurricanes, safe shelter we are seeking.
They expect our gratitude for charity provided.
Instead they should be shamed for it. Charged and then indicted.
They cause disaster every day. The world grows daily worse
as they turn the ship of state into a floating hearse.
Rivers flowing poisons—clouds of toxic gas—
unheeded in the legislation that they pass.
They make a crypt out of our world. They seal their children’s doom,
converting our whole lovely world into a giant tomb.

Prompt words today were gratitude, cacophony, quiet and tactless.

Side Effects: June 6, 2019

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Photo by Josh Coleman on Unsplash.  Used with permission.

Side Effects

Why does all that’s happening continue to astound us?
We’re doing penance for the plenitude that is around us.
Plastic on our beaches, pollutants in the air,
temperatures grown so extreme that we can hardly bear
the world we’ve grown around us. The hurricanes and flooding
that are just the start of things—the poison flower’s budding.
All the miracles of science with which we seek to heal
bring along their opposite as payment in the deal.
We dabble in our nurturing while majoring in our skills
of what we manufacture that ultimately kills.
Cancer in our Teflon and all the poisonous chrome
building up around us everywhere we roam.
Mercury and fluoride, lead and styrofoam
contribute to our comfort but construct a lethal home.
Science often cures us. It comforts and it saves,
but all its buried side-effects may finally dig our graves.

 

Prompt words today were nurture, dabble, plenitude and penance.