What thoughts assail the bronze-cast mind,
That bears the fate of humankind?
He contemplates our brilliant fall,
The hubris that will doom us all.

He ponders man’s ingenious hand,
That carved cathedrals, subdued the land,
Yet could not curb its vaunted pride,
Or sense the faultlines deep inside.

What good is genius yoked to hollow dreams,
That mapped the stars yet missed the planet’s screams?
They shattered atoms, traced the genome’s code,
But could not heal wounds that progress sowed.

What hand unsealed creation’s core,
But left the world more scarred than before?
What intellect designed machines,
Then ravaged forests, poisoned streams?

The Thinker knows what we denied:
That knowledge without wisdom died,
That brilliance freed from all constraint,
Would scorch the very dream it painted.

He wonders if we’ll ever see,
Before the final elegy,
That all our science, all our art,
Were orphaned works without the heart.

His meditation has no end,
No revelation to descend—
For he has glimpsed the destiny we wrought,
We held the key to Eden’s gate, then broke the sacred knot.

He rests in silence, eternally cast,
And mourns the tales from ages past,
Of minds endowed with reason’s flame,
That dug their crypts in progress’ name.

The answer that he seeks in vain:
Could humankind outwit its brain—
Or has the seed of ruin grown,
Too deeply planted, darkly sown?