Tuesday, April 14, 2020

'Harvest', A Poem by Buddy Black

'Harvest'
by buddyblack 2016

Beware, beware,
I warn you well!...
It’s time we’ve broken
From this spell,
That’s held us in
Its vice like grip.
It will not loosen
It will not slip,
As it has not all these years.
It holds us in
Its awful sway,
Through the night,
And through the day.
It has bound our mouths,
And plugged our ears,
And stopped our eyes
From shedding tears.
Pay heed! Pay heed! Don’t turn away,
For you must hear
These words I say.
Take off those muffs, and listen well
To this story that I must tell.
When we began
We were not many,
In this world that flowed with plenty,
And we always thought
That it would stay,
As we plundered along our way.
But soon we grew
As did our needs.
And give me More, I want much more,
Was the nature of our pleas.
The pace was slow but we thought fast,
And those leisure days
Were soon to pass.
Like dinosaurs
Those days of yore
Soon became extinct.
Someone said, we’re much too good
For our feet to touch the ground,
And soon that rumor
Spread around,
And we still have not come down.
Give me more we cried,
I want much more, this world has plenty,
And I’ll be rich
Before I’m twenty
So give me more.
So we dug in with our cold steel Hand,
We raped, and ravaged
Virgin land,
And smelt the treasures from the sand.
All, for the wealth of man.
There’s plenty more we kept on crying,
But it was plain to see
That we were lying.
We fooled ourselves
But could not fool the land.
We could not replace
The ores we took.
We drilled, we probed,
And mountains shook,
And tin and copper from these we took,
And logged it in our profit books.
We extracted evil
Bomb grade ores,
And covered earth
With mighty sores.
Then sunk them deep
Beneath her shell,
And snuffed out the fires
That played in hell.
When we made a lot
Of these man made hells,
We stored them in
Some concrete wells,
And painted signs that
Read ‘for sale,’
So that other’s
Could share in our fun.
But when it became the rage,
We saw our deed,
And knew that This
Was not a Need,
That product of that greedy seed.
We drank the water
From our crystal streams,
But when we slept
We had wild dreams,
Of power the water there
Could breed.
Now sewage plants, and factories
Sit astride those streams,
Where no life is found
And we can’t drink it now
It all seems like a dream.
The air is thick
with the waste of progress,
But no matter we just cough on.
At first the sky
Seemed so immense,
And now we’re wondering
In deep past tense,
Where could it all have gone.
So ration the air,
And ration the water,
And recycle the paper you read.
We’re wasting away
Our precious world,
While caught up
In this endless,
Spiraling Spell
Called greed.

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