Leaves fall, as do Empires, in the fullness of time.<\/p>\n
They say she wasn’t built in a day,
\nbut Rome took generations to fall.<\/p>\n
Will we?<\/p>\n
In the fading dusk of democracy,
\nwe are driven to panic by demagogues.
\nAn empire, a lifestyle, built on finite resources,
\npolicies built on deferral of consequence.
\nFractured consensus, identities of animosity,
\nA groggy center holding, barely.<\/p>\n
A revolution sounds dandy,
\nbut a civil war is no place for innocent,
\nand if you think the other side will cede
\nwithout blood in the streets,
\nhistory has hard lessons for you.<\/p>\n
Leaves fall, like lives spent in the service of empire or idealism.<\/p>\n
But leaves grow back.<\/p>\n
Luxuries our ancestors would have named magic,
\nenvenoming landfills and clogging the oceans.
\nDesertification, rising floodwaters, resurgent diseases
\nspread on winds far warmer than nature provides
\noutside of an asteroid or pyroclasm.<\/p>\n
We are an extinction level event
\non par with the end of the Cretaceous.
\nWe are witnessing the birth of a world
\nthat cannot hope to sustain us.
\nA millennia-long harvest of dust
\nafter a century of sewing the skies with poison.<\/p>\n
Leaves fall, but it grows no cooler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leaves fall, as do Empires, in the fullness of time. They say she wasn’t built in a day, but Rome took generations to fall. Will we? In the fading dusk of democracy, we are driven to panic by demagogues. An empire, a lifestyle, built on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-half-marathon-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49958"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50630,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49958\/revisions\/50630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}