How Did We Get Here

By : Iyanuoluwa Oni

We grumble and mumble

Complain about the heat

Curse the floods and blame the skies.

But we forget,

It wasn’t sudden

It happened slowly

In the quiet of our carelessness

What we burn rises like incense,

Not one with sweet savour,

But a bitter offering

That scars the sky

And weakens the shield above us.

The sun lingers longer now,

Angrier than we remember,

Seasons stumble out of rhythm

Rain falls when it shouldn’t,

And withholds when it must.

We call it climate change,

As though it came uninvited,

Forgetting the fires we lit,

The forests we stripped bare,

The air we thickened with neglect.

We make deposits into flowing rivers,

Careless gifts of waste and disregard,

Till currents grow weary

And what once danced, now lies still

At a stagnant riverbank.

With every sachet dropped,

A silent sentence is passed

Drainages clot, waters rebel,

And streets remember the rains

Not as blessing but as floods.

The trees we felled without farewell

No longer stand in defense,

No longer soften the wind’s rage

Or cool the breath of the earth.

The air grows heavy,

Not just with smoke,

But with consequence.

And still we ask

How did we get here?

As though the answer

Was not written

In every careless act,

Every ignored warning,

Every “it doesn’t matter.”

Yet here we stand

At the edge of what we’ve made,

Feeling the heat,

Drowning in our excess,

Watching the balance we broke

Turn against us.