After Plastic

Escapril prompt: back to nature

Wreckage stars streamed overhead,
Beds and cars of a world now dead,
Streaks of civilization.
I thought I glimpsed my garden shed.

We scurried like chickens without our heads,
For all the concrete, plastic, lead,
Had been lost in the ablation.
We few alive slept sleepless by the riverbed.

We needed food; we needed fire;
We had a need that was much more dire:
We didn’t know how to organize,
communicate, correspond, or conspire.

Now simple speech was a satire,
A joke of what we did require:
If in a second it vaporized,
How could you prove someone a liar?

Our bellies grumbled as it grew dark,
When we found a scalpal standing stark
In the ground which brought a revelation:
Name and date our words on slabs of bark.

It was nearly day when we made a spark
Using information we shared by bark.
The blade missed somehow by the devastation
Kept our positions ever on the mark.

If you wrote a message and there was doubt,
They’d (in barken carving) call you out,
Of the record there’d be an investigation:
One contradiction and you’d be cast out.

As months went by there came a drought,
Our rules banned tapping trees with spouts,
And since we all feared castigation,
We stuck to our stances and thirst wiped us out.