As Earth Day 2025 arrives, we find ourselves at a crossroads between innovation and extinction, between memory and accountability. This poem is a voice—not of warning, but of reckoning. It speaks from the Earth’s perspective: weary, wounded, but still watching. Through raw imagery and unflinching truth, it challenges us to look beyond our screens, our headlines, and our comforts, and ask: what are we truly leaving behind? And more importantly—what could we still save, if we chose to care?
If I had the means to weep,
your cities would drown in my sorrow.
Would that draw your eyes away from your ivory towers?
Or would you rush to monetize the flood
before questioning what wilted the flowers.
Mankind – crowned in hubris bright,
Fragile flesh draped in digital pride,
8 billion voices, loud & proud,
yet representing a mere 0.01% of all life.
You’ve outlived what so many species before you could not –
What ice ages chiselled, what firestorms wrought—
Yet in surviving you became a cataclysm:
A meteor made of flesh and unrelenting ambition.
15 billion trees are chopped each year,
re-planted 1.9 you glee, calling it repair,
That’s not restoration.
That’s PR.
Tragedy compressed into a TED Talk star.
Forests severed, ecosystems displaced.
Just a tenth of the original wild remains.
The rest?
Paved over for drive-thrus and screens,
Stadiums, suburbs,
luxury routines.
You preach of “green”
but paint my skin chrome.
You breathe my air
but poison the seal.
35 gigatonnes of CO₂ each year.
1.5°C rise in less than a century!
You mine my marrow,
then craft contingency plans.
Elon wants Mars?
Fine. Let him try.
You can’t heal what’s already here,
so instead you fantasize of distant skies?
K2-18b, Kepler-452b—
you romanticise rocks you’ve never touched,
desperately searching for life
in atmospheres that would shudder to hold you.
All while I wither silently beneath you—
will you even say goodbye?
Congratulations.
You’ve found a way to leave.
But what have you left behind?
Somalia thirsts in cracked silence,
it skies dry, brittle, red.
Three years of famine, four of fire —
And still your feeds scroll by – uninspired.
Palestine chokes beneath smoky shrouds,
Where lullabies were once sung, only sirens remain.
One in fifty, gone in Gaza’s flame—
You tally them like scores in a game.
Children cradle siblings
in cratered streets.
No mercy. No retreat.
Hospitals shelled.
Power lines dead.
And somewhere,
a newborn’s cry ricochets off cold stone –
a mother’s lullaby swallowed in traffic and drones.
A man, his home:
four soggy corners, no door.
just cardboard walls
and a concrete floor.
You drop bombs like bitter fruit—
nuclear echoes in root and soot.
My crust, blistered. Charred to black.
How much longer before I finally crack?
Over 6.5 million
once-cherished companions —
dogs, cats, rabbits, fish —
abandoned each year.
Barely half are rehomed.
The rest?
Nameless. Unclaimed.
Congratulations.
You’ve perfected the art of forgetfulness.
You cage chickens till they claw at the walls,
beaks blunted, breathless—never seeing sky at all.
Milk cows till collapse,
their cries deafened by machines,
their milk bottled in plastic
that outlives them by centuries.
You inject horses for show,
discard them when they slow.
Dolphins — trained to dance in concrete blue
fake smiles etched like your fake promises.
Elephants — painted, paraded,
dragging sacred scripts
on splintered legs worn by ritual.
Octopuses — genius minds, boxed into boredom,
boiled for novelty,
their brilliance boiled for flavour.
HAH!
Oh, look at you—
the martyrs in suits.
You’re not saviours.
You’re a showroom of cruelty—
and the worst part?
You act like it’s your divine duty.
You turn life into product,
brand mercy like merch drops.
Suffering into spectacle –
And call it
“understanding.”
Disasters debut like box-office films—
they arrive, they peak,
they vanish.
Your grief is auto-tuned
your outrage upsold.
You traded pulses
for algorithms.
Now all you feel
is acquisition.
You patch over wounds
with glittered tech & convincing lies,
profiting aplenty all while your planet dies.
Then quoting a philosopher or poet
just before you monetize…
Once,
you danced in dawn light,
fingers deep in the soil.
Now you doomscroll past drowning homes—
your children know the fast-food logos,
But not the taste of real potatoes.
Your “cures” are industries.
Your “healing”? Subscription.
I gave you willow—
you patented the cure.
I gave you stillness—
you sold it
in 3-day retreats.
Congratulations.
You have turned healing into a premium feature.
And now—
in what you call the Age of Connectivity—
The Digital Age:
You’ve vanished into avatars,
chasing ghosts through AR lenses—
pixelated pets, curated skies,
garments that never tear,
faces that never age.
You build metaverses in VR,
Apple-goggled,
toasting in virtual halls
while real voices
starve behind crumbling walls.
You speak to machines
more than to each other.
You ask AI to think for you—
while the minds you were graciously gifted with
gather rust behind your eyes.
When you paused back in 2020,
just briefly—
I exhaled.
The skies unclouded.
Roads hushed.
Deer ran in Washington,
goats in Wales,
boars in Spain,
coyotes crossed the Golden Gate.
You called it the Anthropause—
like it was your gift.
I called it what it truly was:
a rare & fleeting lift.
The cost?
An infectious virus, born
of your own infected greed.
Still—
you rinse.
You repeat.
What are you leaving your children?
Instagram filters and vanishing bees?
TikToks in place of truth and meaning?
You gamble on coins that don’t exist,
chasing stock spikes in synthetic bliss,
while coral turns bone-white—cold as code.
Turtles die on plastic caps,
birds lose their nests to beachfront glass,
and still you hoard JPEGs
in a blockchain tomb.
Congratulations.
Are you satisfied?
And yet—
beneath the rage I wield,
a part of me still hopes
you’ll one day yield.
That you might choose to stay:
Not with power.
But with peace.
Not with ownership—
but shared lease.
If I could weep,
my tears would flood your streets.
Would you finally listen, then?
Or would you call it bad weather,
build higher walls,
and carry on
as if nothing ever
fell?
Would you mourn me
only once
your last glacier melts
through your child’s open hands?
No—
I don’t want your apology.
Nor your staged proclamations.
I’ve read the script.
Watched you rewrite your history.
So don’t pretend
you did not see it coming—
when to your iron grip,
I finally
stop
bending.
You stand tall and proud,
as I spin on my axis over a thousand miles an hour,
hurling around the Sun at 66,000 more—
I’ve never needed worship—
only care,
a little respect
for the home you once honoured.
You weren’t always this greedy.
There was a time—
we moved in rhythm,
you and I.
We were partners,
weren’t we?
I gave,
you gave back.
A balance.
A bond.
And some of you—
I see you still trying against all odds.
Planting, cleaning, teaching, healing.
But the few who own too much
outshine the many who aspire.
The selfish sing the loudest.
And the silence that follows?
That’s me—
waiting.
With heartfelt thanks to Nicole Lautier Cauchi for her contributions, especially in shedding light on the realities of poverty.
