Urban Eden (Or How the Animals Took Back the Planet)

By Adam J. Pearson

Stallions are racing and blazing through Wall Street,
Slamming through stock market numbers and greaves.
Trees are all bursting through floors at McDonald’s,
Scattering Big Macs and fries with their leaves.

White mice are gnawing the beams of Trump Tower,
Toppling foundations in dust clouds spread wide.
Hippos are smashing through bars in the prisons,
Bringing the wild to the wild men inside.

Blue fish are flopping through decks of oil tankers.
Narwhals drive tusks through the husks of hulls red.
Lions are tearing at bills in the bank vaults,
Ripping imaginary worth to shreds.

Mad monkeys leap through the screens at the movies,
That project old scenes from Planet of the Apes.
Rhinos ram lawyers and step on their cellphones,
Making their mouths fall, like felled trees, agape.

Boa constrictors squeeze around the light posts,
And crush all the light bulbs in red traffic lights.
Cute kittens cuddle on beds in the strip malls,
As panthers eat all the food court meat in sight.

The children all laugh as the cities cave in,
They smile and take selfies as tall towers fall,
While elephants reclaim the land from the bogarts,
The children all Tweet with the birds as they call.

The men and the women are shrieking like banshees,
Wondering why they lost all they had “earned.”
What happened to creatures that stayed so submissive,
While humans claimed forests and fossil fuels burned?

The oceans are rising to erase the cities,
While volcanoes vomit hot lava on bricks.
Fire and water rage from Earth together,
To end the tyranny of human tricks.

Old streets are cracking as flowers push through them,
And green covers concrete in blankets of life.
The cities of death now lie under bright blossoms
That fluoresce in spectra of soft glowing light.

Now no one remembers the madness of humans,
Who wasted their lives trying to outrace the past,
And missed the rich present to outrun the future,
And reach the finish line of cold graves at last.

They died before death and lived barely alive,
Acting out scripts from their cultures, dead lies,
They chased the money torn worthless by lions,
‘Til they were laid out with coins placed on their eyes.

The stallions and hippos and trees and the mice,
The hippos and narwhals and lions and birds,
The snakes and the kittens and panthers and rhinos,
All live on without all our poems and words.

The irony is, though, that this is a poem,
Written in weird words by a strange human man,
Who dreamed Mother Nature reclaimed what we’d stolen,
And raised up her children to take back her land.

The animals watch us from ruins where we were,
They peer through the poem at me and at you,
Will we embrace life and tread soft on the Earth?
Worried, they watch us, to see what we do.

Read More from Adam Pearson at http://philosophadam.wordpress.com/