The soulless, cold-hearted ghouls are amongst us, 

sucking the life from everything we cherish.

And they are our children, parents, and siblings.

Driven by greed, careers, and vanity, they rape Mother Earth, 

like locusts on a binge, devouring all on its pathway to hell.

Drugged with entertainment and unenlightened, they shuffle on,

unaware of the gifted Beauty that glows before them.

The sea swells, and the air thirsts. 

The trickling cadence of fire-scarred 

woodland creeks are silenced.

Pollinators drop. 

Flora shrivels. 

Pastoral grounds flood.

The species called Man roams inland and northward.

Only the fittest can carry on.

As these nomads wander polar-bound,

a once coastal stone tower,

crafted by the weathered-worn hands of a gifted poet,

peeks through the surface of the acidic, crashing waves.

Now, with the fish long extinct,

microscopic beads of plastic swim

through the lookout porthole of the stone edifice.

As flight feathers whistle and orbit above them,

The Last Vulture slyly inspects the slow line of humanity 

trod up the receded coastline beyond the lost tower by the shore.

Carmel-by-the-Sea is Nevermore,

and the submerged Hawk Tower broods blue-gray as an

eternal monument to Truth and Beauty.

D W Orr

Environmentalist, Weimaraner/Dachshund Companion, Photographer, and Poet-Provocateur

Harford County, Maryland,

Here, where it all began, 251 years ago, in the USA

February 22, 2020

An Ode to Jeffers