“What’s a polar bear, mommy?”
Your daughter asks you this time.
They were your favorite animal as a child, you tell her.
From endangered to extinct,
I knew the animals would be the first to go.
It’s just a matter of time until our species is next.
“What’s a sunflower, mommy?”
Brown soon became the new green.
Our choice of drives lazily instead of footsteps, turned the morning fog to constant smog. Gardens stopped growing;
birds stopped their chirping.
The bees even stopped their pollinating.
We took the life around us for granted.
“What’s whale-watching, mommy?”
The ocean used to be a portal to another universe;
we were only just beginning to understand this new world. Our raises in ocean temperatures made both
the whale families and the shark families disappear. There’s only wave-watching now.
“Is that what a butterfly looks like, mommy?” She asks you, pointing to the beautiful monarch. You smile, nodding, glancing back at the painting.
If we, as a population, choose simply to not act NOW, paintings and photographs will be our only forever evidence that the Earth was once beautiful.
But we ruined it.
