Self-Extermination
by Odin Roark

Future children will live with questions seeming to have no answers.

Why must the air above Nature’s hallowed ground
suffocate the sentience wanting only to live life,
not fear death?

Will the greens and blues of earth’s gifts,
ever overcome the suffocating populous?

Where has the quench of clean water,
the taste for loving nourishment,
the sound of gleeful appreciation,
the smell of orange blossoms,
fresh turned soil,
unfettered touches of love,
gone to hide from raging hate?

The how, why, when and where
of carnage remains an innate inheritance,
a curse upon the essence of humankind,
a corrupted species that continues to ignore destruction
of the very ground it stands upon.

Fueled by an insidious loss of spirit,
flames of a misbegotten purpose
intensifies self-immolation,
adding more rancid-layering
to the smothering particulates of aggression’s spew.

Such is the nature and persuasion of man’s war...
with himself.