All the World Was Broken [blank verse version]

All the World Was Broken [blank verse version]

4th October - World Animal Day

Light and more light: the first of days began.

To soar on weightless wings of air, God made

Fair barbary doves and cocksure ravens,

And mighty condors wheeling through the sky.

For broad grass prairies he made wild sheep there,

And bison strong of shoulder, white-tailed deer.

For forests too he fashioned eucalypts

And firs still green with dark and purple cones.

He measured out the oceans and decreed

The rain, then lowered to the deepest seas

The white whale and the starfish flecked with silver.

Light and more light: once more God fashioned Man

Upon the sixth day; to him was assigned

The care and preservation of the earth;

To tend the vine and free the tangled bird;

To comfort calves brought low by orphaned grief,

And spare the aged hen; and through such work,

By answering well the labour asked of him,

Man would exalt and so perfect himself,

His race as well, and thus through worthy deeds

Inherit power to fashion worlds anew.

But all too soon the angels sang alarm.

Man had run wild, like swarming bacteria

Within a scientist's petri dish, there

Forming and swarming on the jellied agar.

Forests of fir and pine were all ablaze,

And tallest eucalypts became a pyre.

The whale lay cut to pieces; slick with oil

The condor drifted. Seas were soon depleted,

And all the air was caked with pollutants.

All the world broke, and God was filled with grief

That he had made mankind; his heart was troubled.

And Man, who once had fallen far, fell more

Until there was no remnant of the world,

Nor any trace of Man, whose final heirs

Could only dream of settling the stars.

And though the power to fashion worlds remained

With God, he never made another world,

For he had lost all faith in judgement's claim;

The cosmos then grew cold, and colder still,

And all the stars went out one by one.