We dream of rust-red plains,
carving dead rock into breath and bone,
of fleeing toward distant suns,
branding ourselves \"pioneers\".
We pour gold into rocket-skin,
chase the void’s cold hymn,
yet mute the choked whispers of mangrove roots,
the acid tides gnawing at shores,
the elegy of wings dissolving to silence.
What folly—to map soil on Martian dust
while our own earth blackens with fever,
to hunt for life in Europa’s cracks
as whales strand themselves on plastic shores,
as tigers become myth, as glaciers weep.
How dare we name ourselves \"world-shapers\"
when we’ve yet to cradle this one’s fraying threads—
to stitch wetlands from wastelands,
to let forests reclaim their stolen tongues?
A people who devour their cradle
will starve every frontier they touch.
You cannot plant Eden on dead moons
with hands still stained by ash.
Before we spin oxygen from stone,
let us relearn the alchemy of rain,
of roots drinking deep in black soil.
Before we raise cities on barren spheres,
let our hearts crack open—
spill the rot of \"enough and \"mine\".
This is not a dirge for space,
but a covenant: to earn the sky.
Let our first exodus be inward—
unearthing the buried seed of reverence,
measuring wealth in salmon surging upstream,
in the thawing tundra exhaling green,
in the night no longer stripped of fireflies.
When we meet the face of another world,
may we bow as Earth’s apprentices—
not with the arrogance of kings
but as kin who finally learned to hold
a living thing without breaking it.
The cosmos bends toward those
who tend their first, fragile home.
— MyKoul