When you see lightning strike
And listen to the thunder,
When fires consume the land
And the seas the earth,
When the fish boil and birds
Drop from the sky and insects
Crawl back into their eggs,
Then you know you have worshipped
False Gods.

The Gods of Steel gave us trains, bridges and guns.
Gave us power to destroy and tear up the land
to suck out its strength, bore holes
Into the bowels of the earth
to build our vision of the future.
But we forgot that the Gods we worshipped
Were Gods who might betray us.

and so we perish, drowned in a cesspit of our own making,
too many rats in a cage nibbling each other's tails,
hoist by our own petard, as the bard once put it,
as we turn the world into a desert
And the planet into a dry wilderness
and kill the rich abundance nature gave.

Four million deaths from seven billion
taught us nothing.
ice melts and the earth warms
as we linger on in small corners,
fighting over the scraps,
collecting old books
growing mold in corners
and the art work once so prized,
abandoned like a red prehistoric handprint
because it does not feed the children.
Instead we tell them stories of golden cities
tower blocks piercing the sky
And say to them and to ourselves
Once upon a time we were civilized .
Once we were different.
Once upon a time we ruled the world and hoped
Until our Gods abandoned us.