They thought the world was just five miles high,
eight thousand miles wide and six thousand years deep.
On the great shore of time
they refused to look outside their little beach-hut.

They didn't believe in the coal forests,
the deserts of Pangaea or the Ice Ages.
They thought everything was fixed, a given.
They didn't believe in evolution or climate change
and so the world was, paradoxically,
destroyed by creationists.

Astonishingly, some of them did see it coming
but the Chicken Lickens didn't want
to jeopardise their credibility by sounding apocalyptic
so they confined themselves to warning only
of a significant risk of a reduction in celestial altitude.

It was an unfortunate law of human discourse
that the more pressing a problem
the more tiresome a cheeseball you were
for going on about it;
importance made it daunting,
like an off-puttingly fat Victorian novel.

They were doomed by social embarrassment
and by the Animist Theory of Technology, their belief
that there's an angel in the capital,
that the umbrella wants to shelter,
the gun to wants to terrify
and the turbine wants to generate.

They didn't invent tools to do their will,
they decided their will by feeling the heft
of the tools to hand,

so they raged on behalf of their cars,
ventriloquising the implicit opinions of their machines,
and became incapable of resisting their aeroplanes'
fathomless desire to be somewhere else,

until finally it wasn't the climate,
it wasn't the crop failures, hurricanes and diseases
but the wars they fought over their last flooded ruins
that gave us our chance.

And now that we have decoded their books
and laid our eggs in their corpses
we must resolve, my fellow cockroaches,
not to make the same mistakes ourselves.

© 2007

See also:
Camp for Climate Action
Max Ernst's “Europe After The Rain II”