You can’t imagine

what it was like before
plastic. The sun shone
softly over fields. Earth
buried the dead as they fell.

We didn’t carry extinction
in eternal shopping bags.
We didn’t swelter beneath
our once life-giving star.

The ghosts of ancestors
rested beside us, protected
us. Now the searing heat
has dried those souls.

We poisoned the waters.
The dust of the past
balloons as we shuffle
across our dead planet.