Upon this fragile orb we stride,
With dreams too vast for earth to hide.
We steal from children’s futures yet unborn,
Ignoring limits, though wisely forewarned.

Fevered minds cast our fate in tools of steel,
Ghost slaves of ancient sunlight at the wheel.
Each phantom gain, each scheming, anxious art,
Drains Earth’s vital core—tears the living world apart.

Once we believed in endless, golden days,
That myth of growth, that gilded phase.
But every acre bent to human desire
Extracts a price—a debt never to expire.

The web of life, fragile, finely spun,
Connects all beings, weaving us one.
Yet in our frenzy to rule and subjugate,
We rend the ties no mortal hand can recreate.

When fields lie fallow, forests rise anew,
Old roots give way as young shoots push through.
Yet in each spiral’s turn, ghosts of plenty haunt the air,
Eden’s lost abundance lingers—an ache beyond despair.

We are, in every age, both cause and effect,
Bound by habits of hubris, hope, and blind neglect.
Our engines, born of dreams that never tire,
Hurl us past earth’s limits, into our own pyre.

To truly cherish life, we must accept the end
Of all those dreams that sought to make the cosmos bend.
Let us find dignity in what endures and gently stays—
And seek a deeper wisdom earned through humbler ways.

Hope endures where conscience lights the dark,
In hands that mend, in voices that embark.
If we reclaim the art of learning to give more than take,
A gentler world, restored, may finally awake.

We crafted our reign from self-spun lies,
Blind architects of our self-inflicted demise.
We chased illusions, truths never revealed.
Our species lost, its fate forever sealed.

So build your monuments in shifting sand,
Unwitting masons of ruin, proud and grand.
We scorned the bounds that might have let us last—
Now dust consumes the excess of our past.