War Pollution

 The eyes of Shigir Idol, bolted tight

To plinth and time, behold no rising light.

They scan not dawn, but haze and choking gray,

The toxic shroud that will not blow away.

This wasn't in the plan, the manifest—

This poison, this slow death for the oppressed.

The guns fell silent, but the smoke remains,

In soil and breath, in children's veins.

Not just the fallen lie in dust,

But forests scorched and rivers rust.

Oil coats the shoreline, thick and black,

A silent war with no attack.

I saw the old wars, grand and bloody things,

Where fields were churned by men and splintered rings

Of steel. The land was torn, a broken shell,

But life, like weeds, would conquer where it fell.

The trenches filled, the graves became a mound,

And still, a peasant might have tilled the ground.

The bombs carved more than battle scars—

They dimmed the light of ancient stars.

A tree that once knew morning dew

Now drinks in chemicals, not truth.

The bombs I knew would tear the flesh apart,

But not the sky, the rivers, or the heart.

We used the earth for strength, for iron, for grain,

Not as a weapon, wielded with a stain.

But this new war—this "progress," as they say—

Does not just kill the man, it kills the day.

It razes cities, not just stone on stone,

But fouls the wind and makes the land unknown.

The sky, once blue, now hangs in gray,

A ghost of peace we burned away.

A child is born where sirens wailed,

Where crops won’t grow and lungs have failed.

They breathe the war their fathers made,

In poisoned light and toxic shade.

The water, once the people’s, free and clean,

Is now a toxic sluice, a chemical scene.

The fields are now a minefield, laced with rust,

And poisoned soil returns to poisoned dust.

The river that I saw, a working vein,

Now carries runoff, heavy metals, pain.

Will they forgive what we have done,

When all the green is gone or gone?

Or walk through ash and ask the sky:

Why did they fight and let us die?

The grand idea was this: a world made new,

Where man would stand in triumph, strong and true.

But now I stand, a monument to steel,

And see a future where the wounds don’t heal.

The ecocide, the slow and creeping blight,

Is not the kind of war that I would write.

The earth is watching, cracked and sore,

It cannot bear much more of war.

My statue stands, a symbol of a cause,

But what can stand against these broken laws

Of nature? The pollution is the foe—

A lasting legacy from blow to blow.

Yet if we plant where bombs once fell,

There still might bloom a tale to tell—

Of how we turned from fire and steel

To something new, and tried to heal.

The future waits in silent plea:

Not war, but peace. 

Not smoke, but tree.