If only… (Poem)

The winter sun is setting fast,
Sinking beneath Atlantic waves,
This age of indifference can’t last,
Where murderous deeds cry out from graves.

Where a young boy’s tears fall like rain,
Onto the bloodstained soil below,
He tries to soothe his father’s pain,
But death comes mercilessly slow.

Humanity will you not learn,
From past mistakes that haunt you still,
Your arrogance saw cities burn,
Your hatred caused young blood to spill.

Mankind who will not be content,
With the simple pleasures life brings,
Is driven by a cruel intent,
And from his empty soul, greed springs.

Mankind, destroyer of this Earth,
Nature’s beauteous wealth you plunder,
This thief knows not the diamond’s worth,
And steals the cushion out from under.

This wondrous planet which we share
With splendid tigers, hawk and whale,
Arctic foxes and panda bear,
Becomes a long forgotten tale.

A fable from a time now gone
When songbirds celebrated day,
When crystal waters brightly shone,
And trees in summer’s breeze did sway,

When night was dark and skies were clear,
No trace of smog or city light,
So that the Milky Way seemed near,
Oh what an awe-inspiring sight!

Then in a moment when we blinked,
All Nature’s wealth was bought and sold,
Until the wildlife was extinct,
Gone were the forests of green gold.

The barren Earth now grey and bleak,
Where war and famine decimate,
The ravaged people, gaunt and weak,
Our stupidity sealed their fate.

If only they could go back to
The second millennium’s dawn,
Convince mankind to start anew,
Before the precious Earth was gone.

If only we could find our way,
Amid the hatred, greed and spite,
The sunrise at the dawn of day,
Would still be an inspiring sight.

By Ciara Muldoon

Co-founder of SearchScene.com, the charitable search engine that protects the living planet, and your privacy, while you search the web.

Written: 1st January 2000. 

Background:

I recently rediscovered this poem. I had started writing it at sunset on the last day of 1999, and completed it on the first day of the new millennium, 1st January 2000.

At the time, I was a 19-year-old physics student at the National University of Ireland, Galway, but was visiting my family in Inishmore (a small island off the Atlantic coast of Ireland) for the Christmas and New Year holidays. The accompanying photo was taken from the beach beside the home where I grew up.

As I recall, the war in Yugoslavia had been in the news a lot at that time, so some of the opening imagery may stem from that.

The Kyoto Protocol, the world’s first greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty, had been adopted in 1997, so the urgent need to address the climate crisis preoccupied my teenage mind.

It is sad to see that not very much has really changed over the past two decades. More of Nature’s wealth has been bought and sold (parts of the Amazon rainforest are now even being sold on Facebook!).

The forests of green gold are rapidbly disappearing, due to logging and wildfires, with parts of the Amazon rainforest now emitting more CO2 than they absorb.

The living planet is rapidly approaching several tipping points and feedback loops which may cause a rapid accelaration in the ecological collapse which has already begun.

Now, more than ever, we need an unprecedented global uprising, demanding urgent action on climate change and climate justice.

There is no longer any excuse for our hard-earned taxes to be spent subsidising the planet-killing fossil fuel industry, especially when renewable energy has become such a powerful competitor, despite not being given the support that it needed.

Imagine what could be achieved if governments everywhere spent our taxes wisely, in a multisolving way, on projects that made the world cleaner, healthier, safer, greener, and more equitable.

Multinational corporations cannot continue to block climate action if billions of people join forces and put sustained pressure on them.

As I said in a previous poem called, “Baby Carrots of the World, Unite!”

“Don’t struggle in the shadows,
Create support networks like trees,
We have more power than we know,
When we rise as democracies.”

I hope that I will soon be able to watch a sunrise, knowing that after so many frustratingly small steps in dealing with the climate crisis, there was finally a giant leap for mankind, powered by a popular uprising, all around the world.

After the old system of extractive capitalism is finally ousted, we can look forward to A Brighter Future, for all life on earth.