Clade Song 12 left

Clade Song 12

Troglodytic Biota to Fritz Haber

You were the salvation that came
a century too late
for most of us
after our caves were gutted
our reproductive cycles disturbed.
The sole nutrient source
ripped from the base of our food chain
by those who would not acknowledge
they had more than enough already.
 
Men
as they always do
went where they had no business being.
Deep underground,
they took our guano,
stripped lifetimes thick excrement to bare rock.
It took them mere days.
And when they left,
they'd starved the primary consumers
those simple ones
whose predators looked on, hungry-eyed,
beat our frail wings,
and followed them to extinction,
our caves reduced to the barren wastelands
the men
had always assumed we were.
 
They fought wars over our islands
grew their treasuries tenfold
just by mining millennia of  waste.
until you.
 
With a single reaction,
you put the mining to rest.
Fixing nitrogen in factories
you brought a new era to agriculture,
feeding a third of the world's population
while in the dark of our caves,
ecosystems once delicately balanced
now barren and stripped
there is nothing to sustain us.
There is nothing left to sustain.
It will be thousands of years
if ever.
 
They will laud you,
a man,
for inventing industrial fertilizer,
for keeping your people alive and fed.
How soon they have forgotten.
Long before your the birth of your civilization
we were alive and fed ourselves.
We were already a well-oiled machine.

 
          
 
Clade Song 12 Right
Christopher Clauss is an introvert, Ravenclaw, father, poet, and middle school science teacher from Chesterfield, NH. He has represented New Hampshire six times at the National Poetry Slam as a member of the Slam Free or Die poetry slam team.  His work explores the bliss and turmoil of faith, teaching, parenting, marriage, and community in rural New Hampshire, as well as the obligatory science and nonsense. Christopher’s poems have been published in New York Quarterly, Plants and Poetry Journal, Sylvia, and Bureau of Complaint.  His mother believes his poetry is "just wonderful." Both of his daughters declare that he is the "best daddy they have," and his pre-teen science students rave that he is "Fine, I guess.  Whatever."  

 

 

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