Anthropocene

“…maybe it’s the time of man…” Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

     

And still, no-one called the self-made mad…

…who went digging the dirt for buried treasure,
calculated profit and loss like dead reckoning
on the one-way street to plenty…

…who believed time was on our side
and industry its own reward…

… as if they had became gods who towered above all
other lesser gods and, for whom, we raised churches,
casting them in our own image, chanting their mumbo jumbo
like holy writ, following in arcane faith, blindly gullible…

…and the slow accretion of poison in our veins…

…cities sprawled; land already ploughed; exhausted.

Our fathers and mothers hunted but we kindled
fire in the blood, claimed the continents,
fed ourselves fat from mountain to sea until,
by tired and sluggish water, we lay down and slept;
setting down our fire in hearths by the shoreline,
we cultivated soil and stone, the temples of our dominion.

The anthropogenic years blew through us, blew around us,
like sand eddying in the deserts we left behind;
we who stripped every uncertainty from nature
to escape the constant uncertainty in ourselves.

Now: filth in the water seeps underground, detritus, grime and stink
slough like dead skin, our eternal waste accumulating.

Gone: the beasts of the tundra, birds of the air, wild fowl,
predators, fish, insect and worm; the living earth clogged
and depleted, crumbs of life crushed to lifeless paste;
and, in the air itself, smoke, our infernal burning, curled
around the world’s throat.

This was the age of Man; no epitaph wise enough:

     Here lies Anthropos, master of his universe and none, 
     creator and destroyer, god of all he surveyed, 
     his own distorted devil. 

     Here lies a lesson in stone and crumbling sand.

© BH, 2017

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While researching the 6th Extinction concept for the poem of that name, 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. 6th Extinction is the companion poem to this.

The illustration is a degradation of the beach at Big Sand with superimposed Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, now imprisoned by his own proportions and a Goodyear tyre.

(Image from Wikipedia).