18 Days - a "tree hugger poem"

I normally don't write "tree-hugging" anything - but something really flipped my switch today, and this poem is the product. It's intended to be read "live" - as in performance poetry, or spoken word poetry - so just go with it...

18 Days (12.21.12)

18 days left until the end of the world!

We’re down to the wire folks – so get your living in now because in 18 days, all this chaos, selfishness, hate, bigotry, joy, happiness, and beauty will come screeching to a halt.

I wonder if the WORLD – the PLANET knows its end is near? I wonder if it knows that a puny, insignificant species on its face has declared its end and death? I wonder how many times before it’s heard about its end and has kept on rollin’ merrily along?

To think that one species can – and has – imposed its superstitions and god-myths on such an immovable and ancient cosmic body. If you need a definition of arrogance my friend, look no further!

For billions of years this wonderful water-ball has spun its way through the cosmos and has nurtured, raised, and even destroyed countless forms of life upon its face, and yet only one species – amongst the millions that have come and gone, presume to declare its end.

While spiritual and metaphysical voodoo can make grand pronouncements about our doom, we are unique in one other aspect, and that is we are the most intelligent species on earth, and we use our accumulated brilliance to figure out better ways to kill each other, foul the very air we breathe, poison the water which sustains us, and contaminate the soil from which we spring.

So foolish.

So near-sighted.

So ignorant in practice.

So cruel to our mother.

I wonder what makes us – the most intelligent of them all – so incredibly stupid that we spend enough on war every day to eradicate world hunger ten times over, and yet, expect us to believe that in 18 days our world is going to end just because a culture composed of humans ran out a room on a circle of stone? 

Pathetic.

Oh silly misguided human animal. 

The only thing that’s going to destroy this world – this beautiful, self-protecting, self-correcting, self-balancing world – are the pitiful human animals who don’t even have the humanity to love each other – let alone the earth – enough to lift us higher than a stone-age culture looking at the stars and seeing only themselves.

18 days left before the world ends? I don’t think so. Maybe we’ll do the earth and all its wonderful life-forms a favor and stop the madness we’ve created, and in 18 days finally learn to love again.

 

© 2012 Michael Hunter