And lo, the Lord saw the sons
and daughters of fallen Man,
drunk on the solid black blood,
burning ancient sunlight to ash
and subduing the earth without prayer
and piercing heaven’s membrane.

The sea shall rise with vengeance,
and you shall suffer the inundation,
and it will devour your coastal monuments,
and swamp your salt-licked economies,
your temples of commerce and vanity.

Behold the grand wisdom of your councils:
men who argue with thermodynamics,
who make legislation against chemistry
and expect molecules to submit to folly.

Witness your graphs and algorithms
as stand-up cosmic laughter.
Your targets and accords are
sandcastles before this tsunami.
Your quarterly profits are
pyres for your grandchildren’s legacy.

The Indigenous,
those once called savage,
whispered to the living, breathing soil,
asking permission from forests before taking,
understanding the covenant of reciprocity
that you dismissed as primitive.

Now behold the sky that burns with fury.
See the seasons that stutter in confusion.
Remember the creatures that vanish, unconsidered,
while you debate whether the fire at your gate
is authentic or political invention.

Your idolatry made gods of unrelenting growth,
erected altars to the scars of extraction,
sacrificed oceans, forests, futures
to the insatiable deity of Consumption.

The Lord witnesses your clever arguments,
your ingenious and fruitless justifications,
your brilliant theories of noble inaction.
But the coral reefs do not attend your summits.
The melting glaciers have not read your reports.
The hurricanes ignore your cost-benefit analyses.

Repent, I say, repent of your carbon liturgies!
Come to the altar and confess your sins of willfulness.

But O the sorrow, perhaps it is already written:
your civilisations falling not with a trumpet call
but with the muffled whimper of air conditioners
failing in the unrelenting heat of hell.

Behold, the Lord reveals to you this prophecy:
there is no economy on a dying planet,
no shareholder value in extinction,
no national sovereignty in collapsing.

The Earth’s skin remembers what your spreadsheets forget.
It keeps account of every extraction,
tallies every emission,
and its final judgment comes as divine retribution.

And on that judgement day, you shall cry out
to your politicians, economists and engineers,
petroleum prophets and mining machines,
but they shall be silent indeed
in the face of catastrophe,
in the new heaven and new earth you have made.

You were given dominion over the earth,
but what have you done with it?

 

27/4/2025