We built our kingdoms stone by stone,
And called the wilderness our right,
The ark we inherited, outmoded,
Listing in the failing light.

The rivers bent to serve our thirst,
We drained the aquifers of old,
Each watershed cracked and imploded,
Its breaking point long since foretold.

We burned the carbon, black and deep,
That Earth had buried long ago,
The atmosphere now overloaded,
While glaciers bled their blue below.

The coral bleached to bone-white graves,
The monarch lost its meadow trail,
The seas grown acidic, shells corroded,
Swallowed islands, pale and frail.

Our children learned to count the cost
Of summers grown too fierce to bear,
Their futures thinning and eroded,
Each breath a bargain with the air.

We fed the machine and fed it more,
Ten billion mouths on one strained sphere,
Our hungry horde, unchecked, exploded
While we pretended not to hear.

The irony will not be missed
By whatever crawls from ash and brine:
The cleverest species, gorged and bloated,
One hand still reaching for the wine.

And so we feast on borrowed time,
The stewards starving at their spread,
Each bitter truth still sugarcoated—
We clawed for scraps till hope had fled,
And gnawed one another’s bones instead.