Poetic Justice

When the last bird and human have breathed 
their last gasp,
when the turgid, oil-polluted waters 
grow still and stagnant,
when the last whale has beached, 
died in agony, and decayed,
and not one cricket chirps, not one worm burrows,
when the last fish flops limply at the edge of 
a lake filled with plastic,
when all the plankton in the boiling sea is gone,
when dead cars litter the landscape
and dead air lies like a haze on the horizon,
when nothing moves but an angry hot dry wind
in the few dead brittle ghost trees that still remain
when radioactivity is the only activity left,
then Earth will receive her poetic justice
and begin, slowly, to heal.
One year far in the future, one tiny green sprout
will burst through the earth's surface
and our Mother will slowly begin
to live again.

For Susan's prompt at Mid Week Motif: Justice or Poetic Justice