She sits upon a rock, weeping
And watching the sky as it folds
Into buckets of toxic smoke
Rising from the endless burning
Of forest and of fossils.
In the sun, her head is melting.
Her hands blanket her nostrils,
Unable to inhale the baked
Dust that overtook oxygen
In the wake of industries.
She leaves the rock and moves away,
Her body covered in the feathers
of birds that could not stand
The darkened treeless sky.
In the distance, she hears
Black rhinos and tigers running
To seek safety somewhere where
Everything is still the same;
A plastic pungent mountain
Much like the poisoned seas
Where whales and fish are dying.
Hunger drums in her stomach,
But crops don’t grow in bombed soils.
She scratches her throat, drinks tears
To appease the gods of thirst.
There is something forming
In her heart, foaming
on her lips as she falls hard
on her knees: A prayer, for healing
To visit this unbalanced earth.
Njukang Princeley is a Cameroonian writer. He writes about anything that affects humanity and the universe. His works have featured or are forthcoming in Brittle Papers and elsewhere. Whether he writes poetry, short stories, essays, or whatever is determined by what comes to him and how it comes to him. In his free time, he loves good books, documentaries, movies, and music.