A WORD WITH HUMANITY

as suspended, worlds and worlds above,
In the unknown path of the stars,
I and other survivors,
Cottonwooled in our protection
Could see, with exchange visions,
What once was,
Our world, Earth, fair and the home of a race,
Once Creations’ Pride.

We looked with dead eyes,
At the smoking and poisoned heap,
From which lethal flames still burned,
Everywhere, far as the eye could see,
lay the ruins of the Citadel of Man.
No living thing,
Not a breath winked out of the Deathscape.
And FLAT and FLAT, FLATENED
The monuments of a Race that had gone berserk
With pride.

The mighty orb, once the plaything of divinities
Lay askew on its side,
As if a giant hand
Annoyed by the foibles of its controllers,
Had slapped it out of orbit.
A gaping hole in its side
Gurgled out its molten intestines
And everywhere were the footmarks of chaos
A toy dumped by a spoilt child
Grown tired of its attractions.

Once, there were oceans and hills and fields
And fair places on this orb.
But now the gigantic wastes of putrid liquid
Ebbed and slowed
And flowed onto shores littered with the skeletons
Of experiments gone awry.
Occasionally as if the horror
Was not enough
Leviathan, now transmogrified
More hideous
With his brood,
Leapt out of the mire
Hideous to see and conceive
Then back again into the womb
That gave them birth.
Giant creatures half-blood and half-metal
Strode the Deathscape on irons of steel,
Gobbling up what remained of the Dead Planet.
And everywhere, the stench
Of a primeval decay rent the air.
But no matter how our vision trod,
Nowhere could we espy him,
Who once sat, imperial on the
High places now demised.

Legend was full that it was divinely origined.
And that of all the kindred spheres,
Worlds and orbs,
It was by far the fairest and the best:
The pride of the Creator’s skill.
It was a planet fair and endowed
And it creatures, the Movers of the Universe.
From its birth, its creatures had held pride
Of place, ensconced in a Paradise
Only a doting Deity could have created for them.

Her seas were tranquil and where a bit wild,
Only provided for the pluck spirit of
Its denizens, eager to explore the Unknown-
Riddles which formed the Maze.
Her heights were lofty, majestic and imperious.
Fields Elysian, banked sweet singing rivers and courses.
Yes, in our dreamstate we remembered
What our planet-home used to be.
And tears, such as only zombies could shed
In the emptiness of their beings,
flooded our eye globes.
Earth was no more and the desertscape
before us,
Was its funeral bier.
No sweet music flowed from long-traveled rivers
Any more.
And the creatures of the sky,
In the cataclysm, had departed into oblivion.
Some, infected with the deadly venoms,
From the Earth, had quietly passed away.

We stoked and we boiled,
We mined and we trenched,
And wherever we went, our Evil Genius
Goaded us on.
Until sightless, we turned on our star,
Devastated it with poisons and electronic spells
And sucked its lifeblood out of it.
Then the Sun howled,
And the Moon sunk into its sheath of Darkness,
And Earth closed up in one fell darkness.
Then the hideous noises came.
Each outdoing the previous
As heavenward, they zoomed,
To announce the progress of Earth’s destruction.
Mankind, so benevolent, so enlightened
Turned on Himself and as the destruction started,
Forgot the foundations upon which he stood
And played his games.

All was silent and Creation stood still with arms folded.
Asking if all these, these, were in vain
And whether the Divine Will could be so thwarted
By Its own Creation.
We saw them, then.
A small band of white cocooned beings
Weaving their wand-like appendages
They emerged from the miry Deep
And a sweet song, low but unnerving,
Pierced the air.