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

A few hours of tittering on past glories of a planet,
Tsal, Pezal and the team see a screen still alive from sun’s power,
Broadcasting (most likely in a loop) with partly dark LEDs
The news of a time when Nature hadn’t turned entirely sour.

Tsal asks himself like a sharp stab to his chest:
“Didn’t they read the signs?” Tropical rains coming early
Then late year on year, messing up planting and harvesting,
While thermometers lost touch with reality, doing exactly what wasn’t said on the telly.

Floods washed away months of tilling and planting on estates,
While droughts washed away whole villages, leaving them empty,
And more nuclear disasters decimated whole cities and states,
But life went on disregarding the warning in Humpty Dumpty

Fiddling with the core’s magnetic fields led to imbalance,
And the Earth struggled to shake off the destroyers,
Spewing molten venom and nerve gas to dance
Upon the lives of sons, daughters and fathers and mothers.

Yeah, Nature had long lost what was left of patience,
As the Ozone let in the rays so long waiting at Earth’s doors,
To steal the seas and rivers out into space’s expanse,
As if to say: “You have all, yet you don’t recognize, and keep seeking more.”

 
 
To be continued…

(c) Nyonglema

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