Poetry: ‘And We Shall Inherit The Earth’

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Courtesy Dermont O'Reilly, Wikimedia Commons

I have been witness to Holocene unheard of.
Where we walk, dead flowers wane in wilt,
filling our footsteps with their shrinking corpses
like the marks of sacrilegious prophet:
leaving cloven hoof prints in the garden of once Eden.

I am perched,
like fading murmuration of bird, preening on barbed fences fraught with fallacy,
on charged cable bridges built from bones of collapsing home,
blood of churning factory workers, weeping,
on perverse pipeline of superfluous greed: garish.

I am coiled,
lifeless, coated in gloss of certainty unsatisfied,
the polish of unjust scales, seeping into salient black abyss of eyes.
I shiver forward, s-shaped, venom pooling in voluptuous teeth,
sinking but into shadows, sallow.

Feel me slouched,
at roadside, twitching toward tallow vultures, shuddering,
oh, my turkeyheaded nurses, oiled black with shame
of first kiss wrapped in burn of 18 wheeler rubber,
the smack of frail skull against asphalt.

I have screamed into the garbagestrewn winds,
clutching cellophane in crinkling fists,
roped by marleychain of plasticbottled corpse
and waste, their heave and sigh in the thickening heat
punctuating the extinction of my anguish:
the haunting chorus of my generation, dying.