Sayyada Khaki (15) was born and raised in Moshi, Tanzania. This poem was originally written for a school project on human beings’ parasitic relationship with the world.

There once was a very lonely town,
With people no longer around.
I make it sound so sad,
But in reality, there’s nothing bad.
This is the story of the place,
That was called Balkanase.

Before the people left,
There was theft, people were stressed and depressed.
All the animals were sad,
Their hearts felt like they were being stabbed.
Literarily and metaphorically
They knew their end would come soon, catastrophically.

The issues they created were many,
The world became ugly and smelly.
They threw their trash without care,
They even began to poison the air
And everything seemed to go downhill,
You could buy anything with a one-dollar bill.

The trash began to take over,
There was no chance even with a four-leaf clover
People no longer seemed to care
There wasn’t even a single pear or bear only an empty snare
They saw the damage,
Even the animals had to scavenge

The demise of the humans came soon after,
The laughter seemed to disappear thereafter.
The humans finally began to suffer,
Life began to get even tougher

The trash was all over the ground, mountains and seas,
There were no more bees or even trees.
The trash was in piles and mounds,
The birds no longer made any sounds.
They had eaten all the trash,
The entire world was covered in ash.

Slowly but surely, we thought we reached the end.
There was no more money to overspend.
One by one the humans began to disappear.
The destroyers of our planet were leaving, we began to cheer.
We’d hoped the world would begin to heal,
And we slowly made a deal.

We began to plant trees,
We cared for our planet and slowly there was bees and even a breeze!
Prayers were made that those wretched humans were gone,
Found another planet to destroy by dawn.
We began living in peace,
The human’s impacts had finally begun to cease

Slowly we resorted our home the way it should be
The animals returned to the seas, we were carefree.
As long as the humans were never to return
Where they could suffer and burn.
I hate to sound so mean and cold
But you should have seen the situation I just told

Now it’s still a bit fragile and worn,
And sometimes we find the need to mourn.
This is the story we never will forget to tell,
The power of humans and our almost demise as well.
Don’t grieve children we say,
In the darkest moments, we found a way.

While I was growing up I had a fascination for Space Exploration however as I learned more about how much we’ve destroyed Earth, I realized the next generations could possibly not survive or live on another planet that has survivable conditions. As part of another school project, I wrote this short story/poem to express what I think would happen if we didn’t manage to save our planet (the human race would live on another planet but we soon make the same mistakes as we did on Earth). I wanted to raise awareness about how even if we find a survivable planet (if one exists), we cannot continue destroying planets and making the same mistakes.

-Sayyada Khaki

You can read more of Sayyada’s work here

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