Tag Archives: poem about pollution

Human Conditions

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Human Conditions

What some see as a plank, others see as a sliver.
What starts out as a rivulet can swell into a river.
But there is a dead center closer to what’s real—
a place optimists overlook and pessimists overfeel.

Some may have solutions that others find absurd
and as a result, simply let go unheard.
But as we spend time bickering o’er who is right or wrong,
more sinister plans of nature flow rapidly along.

There’s a reason we are labeled as the human “race.”
Most problems exist because we cannot slow our pace.
We speed too quickly forward, not considering the end
of all the natural balances that we choose to bend.

The food we grow is excess and we throw away
forty percent of it, every week and day
while people starve around us. We can’t find a solution
to world hunger, extinct species, global warming or pollution.

Each plastic bag we use is the beginning of a motion
that takes it down that rivulet to river to the ocean
where it will join the others—the flip flops and the dishes
that are killing off our coral and our mollusks and our fishes.

We choke our air and wonder why we cannot breath.
Our youths lack a direction. They question and they seethe.
What choices have we left them as we export all their jobs
and give them all devices that turn them into blobs?

If there were a grand plan for ridding Mother Earth
of every single species that had a use or worth,
I think it would be planned by man and not by evolution.
Increasingly we seem to be mounting a revolution

It’s as though we’re pre-conditioned, as though we have a need
first of all, to bring an end to every other breed,
and then to do ourselves in to restore the motion
of evolution once again. To see what is her notion

of what might work the next time in building a global order
that knows its place in things without straying ‘cross the border.
Perhaps billions of years from now, nature will proudly flout
another scheme for nature that this time will work out!

The prompt words today are dead, center, rivulet and globe. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/rdp-tuesday-dead/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/10/30/fowc-with-fandango-center/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/agnostic/(actually, rivulet)
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/10/27/daily-addictions-2018-week-43/globe

Gradual Justice

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Gradual Justice

Life metes out a gradual justice that we may not  see.
Not choreographed for one lifetime, not designed for you or me,
but rather, for the planet or the universe.
There’s no way to avoid it, circumvent it or rehearse.
We’re a part of something larger even as we make mistakes
as nature covers over the snafus mankind makes.
Great men may be jaunty, swelled up with their great plan,
but nature has more problems than looking after man.
She has the heart of all within, seeing a scope broader
than the needs of man or any other great marauder.
There is just so much for any of us. When we grab for more,
we can be pretty sure we may be headed out the door.
What species will replace us, or how will we evolve
if we don’t act quickly our problems to resolve?
Even all technology is part of nature’s plan.
Perhaps it’s written that robots will take the place of man.
Micro chips for healing and mechanical hearts
are only the beginning. They are only the starts.
Species that overgraze domains bring about their endings.
So it may be with us with all our diggings and our vendings.
Machines poisoning our air and putting poisons on our shelves
May only be the means of making more room for themselves! 

 

The prompts today are justice, heart, jaunty and gradual. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/28/friday-rdp-justice/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/28/fowc-with-fandango-heart/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/28/jaunty/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/23/daily-addictions-2018-week-38/gradual

Endangered Species

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Endangered Species

It bore investigation, the gods all seemed to think
to see what’s happening on Earth that’s raising such a  stink.
The clouds of poisonous vapors seemed to obscure their view
so they had to come much closer to see what they could do.
Here everyone seemed eager to screw the other guy,
sure that complete happiness was something they could buy.
They’d have to think of something to divert them from their wrath,
to deflect them from their lust for fortune to another path.

What if they gave them something to redirect their thought
from this mania for wanting what the other fella’s got?
They created Martin Cooper and made two guys named Steve,
gave them creativity and something up their sleeve
to invent these gadgets to connect us all together
so we could help each other in times of stormy weather.
But the plans of men and deities often go astray.
Even gods in heaven do not always know the way.

How could they know that iPads and tiny little phones,
the Internet and Facebook would turn us into drones
staring at our open hands or clicking selfie shots,
intent more on ourselves than in helping the have-nots?
While skulking in the background, cronies of corporation
plotted most unnoticed in corrupt cooperation
to keep the masses busy with their puzzles and their games,
their TV and their movies and their lists of contact names.

We all would be so busy staring at our palms
that no one would be worried. No one would suffer qualms
about what was happening—the greed and the pollution.
Our leaders all the problem and never the solution.
We sold our world for cyber toys, believed their staged reality.
Traded in our real world for scheduled banality.
Kardashians and Candy Crush, sitcoms and solitaire,
Twitter, selfies, Instagram—a virtual nightmare.

Have we really botched it? Will no one come to aid?
Will our species all die out? Sicken, fall and fade?
They say after Chernobyl the animals returned.
The grass and tees grew back where they formerly were burned.
Only humans can’t abide the mess that they have made.
as though they have created their own end by their charade.
It’s the way of evolution. Species come and species go
Those who do not worry as they vanish tell us so.

The thing that they don’t realize, just waiting round the bend
as species after species is herded toward its end,
of all endangered species, another they have hexed
may be homo sapiens, whose extinction may be next.

The prompts were below, investigation and eager. The links are below:

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/08/fowc-with-fandango-below/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/investigation/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/eager

Centering

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Centering

Many folks are fearing the center will not hold.
Our unity is broken, our future has been sold.
But the ways of nature are complex and manifold.
And when the final stories of mankind have been told,
of how we “bested nature” by trying to break its mold,
when all our quests have ended, both for glory and for gold;
 we won’t be its ending, but just another fold
whose exploits lay beneath the earth, written in the mold—
of how we “tamed” an environment that was too brash and bold,
wrapping it in hydrocarbons, conquering the cold.

The prompt word today was “center.”

  

Earth’s Verdict

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Earth’s Verdict

This is the day we laud our Earth
who, from the first day of her birth
has gathered, to increase her girth

around her core, the fertile soil
that, by our labor and our toil,
helps us retain our mortal coil

by giving sustenance to all
residing on our spinning ball.
Yet, we have spread oil’s deadly pall

over this globe that gives us life
until, I fear, our home is rife
with that which cuts us like a knife,

our umbilical to sever.
Always, we deem ourselves so clever
with our improvements, but we never

seem to see the full effect––
how each gain is a defect.
It’s on this day that we reflect

on how we’ve served our mother ill.
And now we swallow that vile pill
and thereby finally pay our bill––

that fine we’re issued as we wait
for that improbable ending date
when all our poisoning will abate.

Knowing still, down in our heart
that all the evils that we start
are but that fatal stabbing dart

that will eventually bring an end
to each family member and friend
as nature’s laws we seek to bend.

Now as we wait in our human queue
to receive the verdict that we’re due,
there is  one fact that’s sure and true.

As we vanish, here and yon,
and as, eventually, we’re gone,
the Earth will still be going on.

Both NaPoWriMo and WordPress gave “Earth Day” as a prompt today.  I’m also using my illustration to fulfill Cee’s Flower of the Day prompt.  Three birds, one stone.

https://ceenphotography.com/2016/04/21/flower-of-the-day-april-22-2016-azalea/

http://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-two-2/

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/earth/