6th Extinction

We are fire; we are brimstone;
A thousand grains of poison;
Corrosive rain drumming.

Ah, tide is rising, the tide we made
With our grinning moon faces
And our lust for power.

Wind is already blowing, steady for a time
But in the night, unpredictable, it howls in anguish

Weather has become a punishment;
Unlocked from land and sea,
We set its fury free in unresisting sky.

When we were hungry, we ate our fill,
Killed at first to fill our bellies,
In the end, for the sake of it.

Ah, this patchwork world, carved
Into field and farm, cities and roads of stone
No room left to for anything to live beside us.

Slow starvation settled
In pastures no longer fallow.
Wilderness, no longer needed,
Withered to a dry stick
And we broke apart the weave of life
For the one human strand in it.

Ah, in this world we have gathered
Only what is precious to our kind.

By microscopic degrees
We soured the earth beneath our feet
Stamped out a billion tiny lives.

To live forever, we fought decay
And became the rot ourselves;
The things we build outlive us
While we smother in debris.

To live forever, we claimed the future;
Fought each other to possess it,
While we destroyed tomorrow.

This is how the human race,
Stopped death in its tracks:
Impermanent in a fragile world
Left holding death in a cold embrace.

This planet;
Humanity:
A plague upon the face of it.

© BH, 2017

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I heard about the 6th Extinction most recently on the radio. Desert island discs, to be exact. I think it was Professor Carlo Rovelli who brought it up. It reminded me yet again of humanity’s phenomenal stupidity, short-sightedness, bloody arrogance. However, I still believe the planet is resilient and maybe we are the pestilence we should fear the most.

While researching the 6th Extinction concept, I found references to the Anthropocene, a proposed new term for the present geological age where human intervention in the natural world is now recording itself in the geological record. The 6th, or Holocene, Extinction, is an event of the the Anthropocene era. Anthropocene, is the companion poem to this.

The illustration is taken from the Paris catacombs, stuffed with the bones of plague victims. I added skull of goat and dodo, plus a skeletal hand giving the two fingers to our stuff and nonsense. I couldn’t resist Pooh in the skeleton suit (and my reference to 'Now We Are Six'. Pooh would be extinct too. Ah, Michael Bond, GRHS!