MOTHER EARTH SPEAKS OUT

[Streamer]

You will excuse me, industrial America,
Old Europe, other places and predators,
if I am too sick to stand
to toast your puissant progress,
to praise and propose
a toast to your technology,
which I feel I should inform you
has begun to poison me
progressively.

Surely I was marred, scarred enough already,
with more wounds than I could heal,
reeling round the sun
in considerable anguish,
picking my way through the stars
painfully, showing fresh sores
to another morning.

Previously you could not quite kill me
with your crude methods,
with your brutish abuse;
but each Spring I recovered,
each Summer I drew
new strength from the sun;
each Fall if I died, or seemed to die,
I did so in the sure hope of Spring.

Now you have grown more sophisticated,
and you open me up
with a surgeon's skill,
though you rifle my riches
with a bandit's grace,
while your noxious fumes and poisons
seep into my system,
and when they have reached my heart,
no birds will sing in my silent spring,
no flowers bloom in my fetid summer,
but the weed will thrive and the flower fester,
and I will breed you monsters
that will howl all night to the moon,
and lift lost eyes
to a lost sun.

Gentlemen, you asked for a toast,
and I will make you one
to your peerless progress,
to your touted technology,
which, if it continues to improve the Human Condition,
as you have it doing now,
Gentlemen, you will have done a fine thing indeed:
You will have poisoned a planet.
You will have murdered a world.


Have a great week
Pete