Give Us This Day….

 Here we are still breathing beneath
a low-lying cloud and the blazing sun, too big for our own britches,
the combined weight of all of us burning through resources while we dither about
politicians, transparent as shattered glass. Swift to love and quarrel and fret, we design
exquisite means to destroy ourselves by teeming over the planet, blowing up beauty. Scientists
predict that humans will keep procreating until a U-turn diminution at the onset of the twenty-
third century of the third millennium, as couples realize they can no longer afford children.

Sunrise streams fantasy across bright water to each of us snug on this south-facing promontory.
Our family embraces a new baby, soft as feathery clouds, sweet on mother’s milk, rosy as dawn.
Intellect blooms in the burgeoning teens, rich with ideas and energy and promise, fluent
in human and machine languages, composing piano and guitar progressions, wielding
algorithms, and computer printing designs, even as we elders emblazon commerce, community,
and the fine arts with finite prowess—still too ambitious to long regret what might have been. 

Here we are penetrating quantum mysteries without budgeting how to live within our means.
After ancients warned us with tales as prophecies, here we are, transients transformed by photons
into potent populations, mining minerals to concoct artificial intelligence, a deus ex machina
more cautionary than the atom bomb. We the people of myth and deity dole out philosophy.
We share and bully in equal measure, terming our actions logic or faith, telling tales tall
enough to justify genocide. To exact a price from everything, we poor souls
set fire to forests to plant fields of grain.