Nature doesn’t need humans; it was there before and will be there after humanity is gone.

The last plasma puff of the engine invites them out

Of the vessel, wearing refrigerated high-tech suits

Equipped complete with claw-like studs gripping cracked grout,

Fighting for balance against the gusts in their pursuit.

  

Tsal pulls out the holo-tablet to map their position

And consult the travel plan. The air crackles to life

At the rod in his hand’s and the one on his chest’s intersection

Showing in script and diagrams what once was humanity’s hive.

 

A step on a fish bone draws a snap which pulls

His eyes downwards then around the oily dirty landscape

Where lay more bones from different creatures whose lives were culled

By a slow death they’d tried in vain to escape,

 

Probably the last of each of their species to have braved heat,

Thinning air, toxins in solid, liquid and gas form everywhere.

Tsal thought of who’d ate whom last at the eve of total defeat

As lives became meatless skeletons after plants had left here.

 

Ok! Back to finding the once supreme masters of this rock

Who built the cranes surrounding this now barren and dry seabed,

As if adorning the grave of many a beast. With some luck,

The image in his hand lights red as it hovers over a broken bone head.
 
 
To be continued…

(c) Nyonglema