Tags
AABB Rhyme, Anthropocene, Darkness And Memory, Ecological Elegy, Elegiac Verse, Environmental Lament, Gothic Atmosphere, Haunting Imagery, Human Consequence, Irony Of Extinction, Irrevocable Silence, Lyrical Grief, Melancholic Tone, Modern Pastoral, Narrative Poetry, Pesticide Tragedy, Poignancy In Loss, Speculative Reflection, Symbolic Nature, Vanishing Wildlife
The summer dusk descends bereft of choir,
No chittered hymn, no pulse of ancient lyre;
The grass lies mute beneath the pale, brooding moon,
Where ghostly echoes mourn a vanished tune.
Where have the fiddlers gone who wooed the night,
Their legs like bowstrings thrumming timeless rite,
Who sang in fevered cadence through the air,
And wove night’s voice in music, tense and rare.
The silence now is absolute and cold,
A vacant stage where once their vigil told
Of seasons turning, harvests yet to reap,
Of lovers whispering where shadows sleep.
I searched the hedgerows where they used to dwell,
Every stem, every leaf, and hollow shell,
But found no trace of wing or insect frame—
Just hollow grass that bore no whispered name.
The scientists speak grimly of the cause:
Pesticides that mocked all natural laws,
And warming nights that shattered primeval code,
While concrete sprawled across their last abode.
Yet here’s the twist that makes my marrow freeze—
Perhaps they vanished, sensing slow disease;
Perhaps they saw what we refused to see,
And stilled their voice in veiled prophecy.
For we who poisoned earth with careless hands
Now lie awake in self-made barren lands,
And in the void their chorus used to fill,
We finally hear our conscience, cold and shrill.
The children never knew what they have lost,
They cannot mourn a song they never crossed,
They sleep through sterile silence, unaware
That emptiness now permeates the air.
The crickets sang our requiem, it seems,
Then vanished softly through our fevered dreams—
They warned us long before we knew the cost:
That when their music ceased, we too were lost.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 