Payback Season

Foreword / Introduction

I think people should be doing way more to actually stop all the damage we keep causing to the planet. It’s like wrecking nature is some weird top goal for humans, and I’ll never get why. Honestly, I also think the usual message from vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, and all the rest is just way too soft. It doesn’t hit hard enough for me. So, here is my poem. It isn’t nice, but at least it’s honest.

Poem: Payback Season [Free Verse Protest]

The forests burned and oceans rose,
we took and took until it broke.
Now something is shifting in the dark,
the animals have had enough,
they’re done with cages, done with pain,
and honestly, we had it coming.

The wolves don’t hide in mountains anymore,
they walk through cities like they own the place.
Their eyes are cold, their teeth are sharp,
and when they look at us they see
the same thing we saw in them before—
just meat that screams, and bleeds, and dies.

The bears remember every trap,
every bullet, every stolen cub.
They’re tearing through the suburbs now,
ripping doors right off the hinges,
dragging people from their beds at night,
and nobody is coming to save us.

The cows we slaughtered by the millions,
they’re marching through the streets in herds.
Their hooves sound like thunder on the concrete,
trampling everything we built,
crushing cars, and bones, and dreams,
payback for the killing floors.

Even the birds are different now,
they dive in flocks and peck out eyes.
The sky is not safe, the ground is not safe,
nowhere to run, nowhere to hide,
we’re the endangered species now,
and they’re not keeping us in zoos.

We poisoned rivers, melted ice,
we burned their homes and called it progress.
Now the world belongs to them again,
and we’re the ones who beg and bleed,
hunted like we hunted them,
screaming in the dark like prey.

But maybe it doesn’t have to end like this,
maybe we can stop before it’s too late.
Close the factories, save the trees,
give them back what we stole,
treat them like they matter, because they are alive,
before they decide we’re not worth keeping around.