Tags
Anthropocene Elegy, Dark Romanticism, Ecocriticism, Environmental Reckoning, Ethical Mourning, Human Hubris and Consequence, Industrial Decay, Melancholic Reflection, Nature’s Retribution, Post-Apocalyptic Lament, Sublime Melancholy
The smokestacks coughed a solemn prayer,
To hollow skies that never cared.
The engines sighed as pistons ceased,
A requiem for lives deceased.
The rivers writhed with tainted flow,
Each poisoned mouth a muted woe.
The forests seethed with tongues of fire,
Ashes whispered death’s cruel choir.
The birds fell silent beneath pale skies,
Their scattered bones bore silent cries.
No songs remained, no morning crest,
Just howls of hunger and savage unrest.
The markets shrieked in hollow halls,
While rust consumed the crumbling walls.
Ledgers bear greed’s voracious hand,
Unpaid debts to ravaged land.
Machines that promised endless gain
Now rotted on the barren plain.
Their steel a grave, gears in reverse,
Progress devolved to darker curse.
The oceans boiled, the shorelines fled,
White coral cracked, its colors bled.
A salted desert claimed the deep,
Where leviathans once dared to sleep.
And sorrow stalked on fragile knees,
Through desolate and dying seas.
It murmured soft, in bitter jest:
“You milked the earth, she gave you death.”
The final hymn was not a song,
But silence stretched too wide, too long.
The fracturing web of life withdrew,
Its brittle strands dissolved from view.
No bells to toll, no choirs to weep,
The earth now wrapped in endless sleep.
And despair sings its solemn, dirgeful tune,
A lullaby beneath the merciless moon.
Am I alone to see the fall,
While others heed no haunting call?
Does reason waver, crack, or cave,
As all march blind into the grave?
Sorrow bears the silent weight,
Of mankind’s wound, and cruel fate.
To know the end, yet keep it hidden,
A heavy ache, forever imprisoned.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 