-Today-
                 (the grind)

There a vision of myself stood,

Pondering the ocean’s horizon, 

My boot-heels sinking imperceptibly,

Into the soft sucking sand, 

As the giant bladed machines,

Slowly whirled before me, 

Generating energy for all the world 

To grind through another day.

Senseless war continued to escalate,

Across this Atlantic Realm, for an

Egomaniac’s fantasy to expand a

Rusting Russian Empire, built itself, 

On an ever sinking pile of ruins.

               -Yesterday-
               (the freeze)

Dark deep-set eyes, 

Of a primitive ape-like being,

Peer across a grim, glaciated and

Ice-sheeted landscape.

This hominin, a planet population

Member of a remaining few thousand,

Will survive and breed through this

Harsh, Pleistocene Epoch.

Just an Ice Age, Thin Thread of Sentient-being Life,

Is all that bridges us back over 600,000

Years of Evolution as Homo Sapiens.

And below these upright beings lies the strata of 

Giant Creatures that once roamed and dominated

This rocky planet for over millions of years.

Only to be wiped clean of their presence by an

Apocalyptic collision with another rocky sphere, 

Hurled by chance through the vast 

Expanse of our own Solar System.

               -Tomorrow-
                (the burn)

Through the Space Station Portal 

Gazed a long term Time-Traveler.

Below floated the Blue-Marble planet, Earth.

The Traveler’s heart was heavy with grief,

Now knowing a rendezvous with home would not be.

For unfettered Power and Avarice would 

Prevail during the preceding four-score years:

Worldwide food shortages, drought, epidemics, and 

Northern-bound mass migrations had changed the 

Geopolitical landscape -

Into one of Absolute, Final Despair.

Anthropogenic climate change had run its course,

Without appropriate intervention of mitigation policies.

A human-wave of Chinese incursion into Siberia,

Becomes the trigger point -

Artificially Intelligent Machines 

Launch an irrevocable nuclear strike, 

From the Perpetually-at-War, Russian Empire.

A post-holocaust population 

crash was now emerging:

500 million hollow-eyed souls remained.

Living primitively and wandering aimlessly,

Further and further,

Into the far reaches of the Northern Hemisphere.

Now, a Hot-House Age, Tenuous Line of Life is

The New Bridge to Eternity.

But yet another species of Biodiversity 

Extinction was near: Mankind.

However, the Rocky Planet, once known as Earth,

Would carry on for another 4.5 billion years,

Until its host star, once known as Sun, would

Extinguish its life sustaining Light and Energy.
____________________________________________________

D W Orr
Environmentalist, Weimaraner/Dachshund Companion, Photographer, and Poet-Provocateur
Harford County, Maryland,
Here, where it all began, 254 years ago, in the USA

November 2, 2023

Today: Offshore Wind Power TODAY: "Offshore Wind Power" by D. W. Orr Photography
Yesterday: Fireball Over Stonehenge YESTERDAY: "Fireball Over Stonehenge" by D. W. Orr Photography
Tomorrow: The Earth at Night (Black Marble)Image courtesy of NASA Earth Science. TOMORROW: "The Earth at Night". Image courtesy of NASA Earth Science.

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To learn more about the tenuous line of life:

Popular Science: “Ancestral Bottleneck”

Hothouse Earth, AI, and James Lovelock