Dear World

Dear World,

Sometimes I wonder

If I’m here just to watch you die.

Everything seems to be crumbling around me,

And I’m watching the death of a planet

That is trying so hard to survive: trees are

Planting their roots as deep as ever and

Stretching their branches towards the sun that is scorching, storms are

Rising in the night on the backs of warm winds

That should be colder, stars are

Shining as bright as they can, though the light still washes them away.

And we have put things in the universe that were never meant to be there,

More than just the satellites that form a second atmosphere,

More than the space junk that gets left behind from our moon missions and probes,

But now even a car

            (of all things, a car?!)

Is sent to orbit the sun forever

A mark of human conceit that will last for the next several billion years,

Away from the natural forces of erosion that would wipe away such a mark on Earth.

We are stretching out our reach,

As if it is not enough that we have cluttered up this planet—

            Forests destroyed,

            Species hunted to extinction,

            Waters and skies and ground polluted—

Because, as always, we have the need to claim

And to remake the universe,

So beautiful and strange,

Into our own image.

We fear the unknown, and we cannot possibly know everything,

So we make up excuses and spout our technobabble

And continue to take, and take, and take.

Dear World,

I am watching the death of all life,

Watching the death of humanity,

Watching as we kill everything around us.

And we are dying in our homes,

A race of people who are being poisoned by our own devices,

And who sometimes only seek healing

In even more destruction.

World, I see the scars on your wrists,

And the knives in your back,

And I see you trapped alone in your bubble of silence,

Screaming for help

Where no one will ever hear you.

I see you reach out across thousands of miles with your amazing handheld computers,

And I see how alone you are,

That you don’t even know the names of your neighbors.

Your friends are distant, World,

Because even though you grew up together

You have since scattered to the winds,

And now your only contact is through screens.

I see you struggling to conform,

Struggling against conformity,

And not being accepted either way.

I see you lying in the dark,

Curled up and too tired to scream,

Because that is what I see

When I look at myself.

Dear World,

Sometimes I think that I’m the one killing you.

And then I realize, no, that’s ridiculous,

No one person could do all this.

We are killing you.

This death started long before my birth,

And those who destroy now

Are only continuing the work

Of their ancestors.

We are human, and we act without thinking,

We act out of fear

And wind up destroying the things that can save us

Or teach us

Or heal us.

Is it too late to change our greedy, fearful nature?

Maybe not,

But it is too late for many things.

It is too late for the dodo,

The Tasmanian tiger,

And the Pyrenean ibex.

It is too late to grow up running through the woods,

To know from experience what brambles and nettles and wildflowers are,

Instead of having to look up those terms to understand them.

In truth, World, I feel as if I have never known you,

Because I have never seen you in your pure form,

Untarnished by human activity.

I know you secondhand from stories and pictures,

As an admirer from afar,

But I have never met you face-to-face.

I was born too late to see you,

Born after the lights covered the night sky—

            The sky full of a billion stars that I have never seen, never—

Born after the roaring cars covered the quiet,

After the roads and buildings covered the wilderness.

I was born too late to see you alive,

But perhaps

Not too late

To watch you die.