After a night of no cicadas humming their lullabies
One day we will all wake up to the sound of no birds in the predawn
No whir of wren wings in the morning, no doves calling in evening
But it won’t be silence that greets us as we rise to the day
The background byproducts of civilization will greet us instead
Incrementally intruding, persistently polluting, relentlessly excluding
Pressuring life to retreat before the advance of asphalt and concrete
Enduring evidence of the messes we made and then we just walked away
To make another mess somewhere else
A mess no doubt hazardous to health
Because cleaning up is so damned inconvenient
So beneath us for we are gods
And we call this living, we call it civilized
We even call it normal
This world we are creating with our unchecked greed
As we push life away and declare we’ve been freed
Selling plastic parodies of lions and bears to children with their happy meals
Until the real thing is not even a set of synapses
Just a distant memory in a digital archive on a long-forgotten hard drive
Corroding in a landfill tended by robots
They have no word for birds
Photo by Ryk Naves via Unsplash
