We have gone where we should not go—
in early morning, the planes
scrape against the blackboard of the heavens,
awakening us to the melody of metal birds
that were never meant to fly in the kingdom of real wings.
The explosion of sound splits the silence of the clouds:
we are welcomed to the artificial world.
We send a shrieking rocket vulture bursting through
and past our earth, to feed on far-off lands beyond this shrinking one,
but no breathing grand sequoia has been seen, only infertile moon dust--
no oasis to quench our burning thirst for a new home
we children have exhausted all our toys in this
old Eden and turned it into a watery grave.
We need a new playground to pillage and destroy.
Colonists of the skies and seas.
We have rejected and tamed the natural world.
No need to glory in the playful swoop of doves and dolphins
in their rightful places, but to
smash into them with our cars of the sky and oceans,
not wait around after the accident to check for life, just
stamp their passports null and void, their spaces are now ours.
So did we deal with the Indian when the buffalo
blocked the way west. Consumers and trains had to
cross the plains to bring in the bucks,
so we took over the middle ground of earth
by mass slaughter and called it holy war
marking it with the authority of our superiority.
We cultivated the wilderness, laid the grasses low,
grew the corn and wheat high on the plains
sprayed them with chemicals and bioengineered them
to make somebody rich.
Now I reach across the breakfast table
where plastic flowers, unyielding to my touch,
glimmer in pots, without any fragrance.
I fill my breakfast bowl with processed shapes and
proceed to cover my enriched bread with synthetic cheese.
The marketing wizards have manufactured a matrix
beside the natural world and with their
legerdemain, abracadabra, have
covered the real world with a cloak of invisibility,
replacing it with a doppelganger
that has decimated the forests with a murderer’s hand.
The newspaper reveals every day how
the vitality of the world vanishes, even
our food depleted of nutrients. We fall victim to poisons
praised by the thieves of industry in the liar’s name of progress.
Our bodies break down -- there cannot be
a next generation.
Wind and water are actors in command of the world’s destruction,
no use to rebuild.
The stage is set for excellent repeat performances.
Did the serpent come to tempt us to fly to foreign lands
to have some fun and thereby poison heaven?
Too late now to build our ark, for there is
nowhere left where it can safely come to rest.
About the author: Norma Felsenthal Gerber lives in New York City. She is an educator, business journalist, and photographer. She has nine books on Amazon, fiction and poetry in Ariel Chart Magazine, and nonfiction in Eastern Iowa Review.