Dr. Padmashree R P Poet Free verse

Letter to the Unborn

Dear child I haven't met yet,
dear possible daughter, theoretical son,
I'm writing to explain what we were thinking,
or rather, what we weren't.

We knew. That's the thing.
We knew about the glaciers calving,
the coral bleaching, the last male
white rhino dying in captivity.

We knew, and we went to work anyway.
Filed our reports, attended our meetings,
posted our concern on social media
between pictures of brunch.

The scientists held up their charts,
the hockey stick of warming,
the red line climbing like a fever
in the body of the world.

We nodded. We understood.
Then we bought another car,
booked another flight,
ordered another thing delivered in a box.

Not because we didn't care.
We cared so much it hurt.
But caring is easier than changing,
and changing is easier than sacrificing.

I marched. I signed petitions.
I brought my own bags to the store
and felt virtuous for doing
what should have been the minimum.

Meanwhile, the CEOs made speeches
about sustainability and growth,
as if you could have infinite expansion
on a finite planet. 
As if words could reverse the physics of burning,
the chemistry of carbon,
the mathematics of too much, too fast,
too late, too little.

Your grandmother's generation said
they didn't know. Maybe they didn't.
But we knew. We had all the data,
all the evidence, all the time

to change course. And we didn't.
Not because we were evil,
but because we were comfortable,
and comfort is a drug we couldn't quit.

The summers are hotter now.
The storms are stranger.
The fires burn longer.
The floods come faster.

And still we argue about the cost,
as if there's any cost higher
than the one you'll pay
for the world we're leaving you.

If you exist, if anyone births you
into this precarious future,
you'll ask: What were they thinking?
And the answer, I'm afraid, is this:
We were thinking about our mortgages,
our careers, our comfort, our now.
We were thinking someone else would fix it.
We were thinking we had more time.

We were thinking of ourselves.

I can't undo it. None of us can.
The carbon we've released
will be in the atmosphere
long after we're gone.

But maybe, and I know this sounds
like the kind of hope we didn't earn,
maybe you'll be the generation
that finds a way to forgive us
while also refusing to repeat
our mistakes. Maybe you'll build
what we couldn't: a world
where survival isn't a privilege.

Or maybe you won't exist at all.
Maybe the choice your parents make
will be to spare you this mess,
to let the line end with them.

Either way, you deserved better
than the future we're bequeathing.
You deserved adults who acted like adults.
You deserved us to be worthy of you.

This isn't an apology,
apologies require action, not words
just a record. A confession.
We knew. We knew. We knew.

And we did it anyway.

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