Who Will Speak by Lawrence Wuest

Who will speak
For the last standing tree,
in the last standing forest of a decimated earth?
Yes, Who will speak

And Who will Stand
Against blade and chain and pike and steel
Yes, Who will stand as human shield
Against the ruin of corporate insanity
Against the waste that feeds man’s insatiable vanity
beyond all bounds of rhyme and reason
into the realm of ecological treason

Yes, who will stand?

And who will speak
When the captains of the capitalist cabal
feed human life itself to their engines of hell
misguided denizens of mother earth
in profit per fortnight measuring worth

And who will speak in these troubled times
When vengeful politicians of soulless wit
through fraudulent distortion of the democratic writ
seize power to inflict a colourless vision
yea, a spiritless, lifeless, sullen transition
of the once proud Canadian nation
into a corporate moonscape of eternal damnation

Yes who will speak?

Who will Speak?

Who will speak
For the last standing tree,
in the last standing forest of a decimated earth?
Who will speak
When the pounding wheels of commerce grind
the last leaf, mould, twig and vine
into the cauldron of their biomass brine,

Yes, who will speak
for the lost trees that once danced lightly
along lake and stream and mountain mighty
in the musical eloquence of harp and bow
whose flex of grain, sang so sweetly
the harmonious chords of the lyrical strain

Who will speak
When the last vestige
of a moist fertile earth,
the triumphal work of a thousand generations
Is robbed of every surviving hint, yea every last organic tint
By throbbing diesels of industrial gyrations

And who will speak
For the lost organisms of a million ages
the shrub , the herb, the moss, the fern
every mite, and bird, each leaf and worm
Sacrificed at the altar of insatiable greed
for meaningless troves of material trash
in trade for man’s filthy lucre, his horded cash.

Yes, Who will Speak?

And Who will Stand
Against blade and chain and pike and steel
Who will stand as human shield
Against the insanity of man’s consumption
Against the tide of waste in man’s presumption
beyond all bounds of rhyme and reason
into the realm of biologic treason

Yes, who will stand?

And who will speak
When the corpulent captains
of the capitalist cabal
feed human life itself to their engines of hell
those misguided denizens of mother earth
in profit per fortnight measuring worth

Yes who will speak.

And who will stand
Against this blight on Gaia’s green earth
this human pest of expanded girth
who In a heartbeat of the evolutionary strand
Like some plague of an incestuous clan
Has raped and pillaged the planet blue
betrayed the legacy of its brilliant hue

And at the dawning of the lifeless age
Who will speak in the gathering gloom
To inscribe the history of the impending doom
That cut short the natural progression
The silvery glide of harmonious succession.
Innocent survivors of a million ages
thrown to the dustbin with all the sages
Who failed to speak,
Who failed to stand
Who fed the parasite with their protests bland

And in the world that is reborn,
those of knowledge will look with scorn
Upon old sad and hapless man,
Drowned in his sea of gathered treasure
Blinded by the fog of his opiate pleasure
Who failed to see the world, its natural beauty
Failed to embrace the crown, his inherited duty
Oh monumental traitor, Oh mournful drone,
failed steward of the precious stone

Yes,
Who will Speak?
Who will Stand?