The passenger pigeon darkened skies for miles across the eastern continent
Three billion birds and then within a century — not one
The last one died in nineteen fourteen in the Cincinnati Zoo
Her name was Martha and the hunters said it was just done
The Amazon loses an area the size of a football field each minute
The lungs of the planet opened by the chainsaw and the match
The indigenous communities who held the ecological knowledge
Are murdered at a rate the conservation reports quietly track
The coral bleaches in the warming ocean — quarter of it gone
The reef was a pharmacopeia — was a library of chemical design
We burned the library before we read the books
We silenced the singing before we understood the sign
Barbatos hears what we have lost the capacity to hear
He moves through forest with the count and all his huntsmen
He speaks the language of the crow and of the running fox
He remembers every hidden treasure we extracted in our hunger
The birds are singing something we have lost the ears to hear
The animals are carrying the knowledge of the land
Barbatos opens what the extraction economy has sealed
The treasure is not underneath — it's what we had in hand
What they called wilderness was always someone's home
What they called resource was always someone's kin
Barbatos remembers every singing that was silenced
The count rides on — and we could still begin
The Ogallala Aquifer has been drawn down to a crisis
Eight million acres of Great Plains agriculture drink from its reserve
It took millions of years for the glaciers to deposit it
We will exhaust it within decades — and we have observed
This plainly — and continued anyway — because the quarterly return
Demanded it — and no senator wants to end the harvest
The indigenous peoples who managed the plains for ten thousand years
Were removed precisely so the market could determine the largest
Short-term extraction yield — Barbatos watched the bison fall
Sixty million animals reduced to near extinction in a decade
The U.S. Army encouraged it — the bison were the food supply
Starve the people by silencing the land — efficient and elated
In board rooms — the naturalists who warned were called romantics
The economists who model endless growth on a finite sphere
Are still the ones consulted in the chambers where it matters
While Barbatos walks the silent forest — and he hears — he hears
The birds are singing something we have lost the ears to hear
The animals are carrying the knowledge of the land
Barbatos opens what the extraction economy has sealed
The treasure is not underneath — it's what we had in hand
What they called wilderness was always someone's home
What they called resource was always someone's kin
Barbatos remembers every singing that was silenced
The count rides on — and we could still begin
I am the song the passenger pigeon carried to the silence
I am the root knowledge of ten thousand years of tending
I am the coral's chemistry — the forest's pharmacy
TheSeventhKey_77
