He flops at rest stops
hid by other sleeping truckers.
He likes the loneliness
as the cab windows gradually mist over
with smokey stars.
Rolling on,
cities of light flare upwards
and beneath them
are the unseen, the dead eyed
that hide under a metro-glare.
Amarillo, Detroit, Tacoma, Richmond,
places packed and stacked
with broken dreams and loose ends.
Just driving; hauling and honking.
No one looking.
Launderettes and liquor stores,
five finger fandangos in the back,
chicken wings and Jack D.
Atlantic City, Apalachicola,
soaking in the slipstream
while America looks somewhere else.
What are you watching America?
Sometimes he thinks
only the coyotes are paying attention.
Roads thread through his fingers.
The Great Lakes shimmer,
Rockies rear-up and ripple,
all those dust painted
played-out rural towns,
the roads are his tunnel
through both beauty and depredation.
Old men on roadside benches
stare unphased by his air horn blare'
as if he himself were an 18-wheeled
rolling exhibit of America itself,
yet no one looks long enough
to care.
Dams, mining, extraction and fracking!
Logging, trawling, oops this urban expansion!
Plastic, toxic sludge and fertilisers,
Industrial revolution, Mass production!
Rising pollution and depleting fossil fuel.
Expanding population, you greedy humans!
Squeezing nature and melting glaciers
Chocking gases creating Climate conundrum.
Speeding extinction, your helpless restrictions.
Destructing ozone layers, eroding my very foundations!
The earth in pain whispers to me:
Why are you causing this depredation?
Look at my dereliction!
Please stop this destruction.
WHISPER TO ME Ii CONTEST
Sponsored by: Regina Riddle
Date: 14th June; 2020
I
Grey spaces, but the day has broken
Hope rubs an eye, turns back to snooze
Clear water in mason jar hold one life
No frills, no leaves, ochre lotus intrudes ...
Hopes falling into grey sleep
II
Sometimes a solitary dandelion defies
All the cruelty, machinery of man, mowing all
That stick out rebel-like in manicured lawns of his lives
His dreams, his families, his nations small
Or huge - no matter but his mind ... Korea is small!
III
Field of yellow dandelions
Like a million galaxies with their suns
Daring darkness to do its worst
Or that single lotus in the fens ...
Of our concomitant creation (beauty? beast?)
IV
There where imagination has married vision
A mustang survives yet another depredation
Emerging among the blood-red poppies
Bold ... daring even woman to tame his Spirit
If she could ever catch whatever happiness is
Everything that is created one day becomes extinct with His manifestation.
For billions and millions of years forests, rivers, valleys, mountains and civilisations,
Completed a cycle, suffered a long periodic destruction and depredation.
Animals and birds became extinct for new phoenixes to be born as per His ordination.
Time and energy cannot be destroyed, they can only be transformed to enter
Into the sunken seeds under sod, and a Noah to render life on this planet once again.
Material world periodically becomes barren and devastated like hibernation in winter,
The sun rises to a new golden age and the sod sees sprouts bloom in their domain.
January 5, 2016
Contest: Extinction
Sponsor: Anthony Slausen
The pollution is psychedelic
Hell, you could even say poetic nature
Terms of enragement
Definitely not engagement
Can suffice in describing the depredation
Fire from the skies
Burning through the system
Dropping through to nothing
Learning not what’s in them
Always running from them
We may hide our voices
But you hide your souls
Torturing us with woes
Never able to feed our hole
Scars bleed out like coals
Paint it any color you like
Doesn’t change a thing
This war that you’ve brought forth
Has killed us all
In the past and future
There is no now…
The province of delayed gratification
Poetry is dead.
There is now no appetite for deep reflection
In this far from limpid pool.
Abhorrent is meditation
To the present lords of all misrule.
Carpe diem once was for the nonce
Its writ now runs for aye.
Omnivorous science depredates
The very bones of our being.
Gradgrindery completely disintegrates
The very heart of our seeing.
Dawkins' dogma aims to destroy the spirit
And we are not the better for it.
Thus shrivels the soul and all that resides there,
Are we but creatures of accident,totally threadbare?
Until economic Armageddon strips us of cultural shame
Our choice is but to shroud the flame.
Depredation must needs be followed by reparation.
And then that rara avis,the phoenix anew
Will rise from the ashes,bright feathers in view.
We will illumine our world once more
When the bright flame of poetry will once again soar.
I have held the child and crestfallen
been. I have seen the face of famine
its peevish and sullen glare, a face
with hollow eyes and missing smile.
Of slow and ambling gait it drags
its cloak of misery and despair with
neither thought nor care.
It hands out pain and poverty in ever
increasing portions, disease and total
depredation flow in streams of human
sadness. Hearts and souls are reaped
in the squander of man's neglect, as
the child's cry is drowned in the open
apathy of fellow man.
Monies donated often lost or misspent,
policies adopted constantly fail, ideals
concealed in hidden agenda's, dreams
smitten by the sword of avarice and
greed.
The West sits astride the mountains
of surplus commodities to maintain
price levels, as the arms trade to the
third world flourishes bestowing
more grief and suffering.
It is beyond belief that in Africa
green oasis's were created so that
the World cup could take place, and
yet in other areas a field of corn or
wheat is still wanting.
Human we are humane we are not,
somewhere in the jungle of priorities
we are lost. Yes I know tonight I will
sit and eat my fill in comfort, maybe
a dessert of guilt.
Latching deceased life
Mineral depredation
Mosses vital spark
Nathan Bane Leccese
© All Rights Reserved 05/24/2009
From a tiny acorn buried by a squirrel
Grows a mighty oak tree to brighten up the world
An accident of nature,or part of Gods great plan
To keep this old world going despite destructive man?
All the wonderous miracles of nature that we see
Could not survive if God did not keep working constantly.
As fast as He can build it,no matter what the plan
Man comes right along behind and tears it down again.
They give no thought of what will come of their selfish depredation,
Or that they are the keepers of all of Gods great creations.
That they themselves are said to be the greatest plan of all,
How mighty stands the giant, just before his fall.
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