BARBATOS

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