First She Came for the Dinosaurs
After Martin Niemöller and Bertolt Brecht
by Roger Stoll / November 21st, 2021
First She Almighty came for the dinosaurs.
But that is just the way things happen.
Much later, hunters came for the wooly mammoths,
Saber-toothed tigers, and giant wombats.
That shouldn’t have happened but it did.
Still, I was none of those creatures so I said nothing.
Then they came for the dodos, great auks,
Passenger pigeons, and giant moas.
And I said nothing.
They kept coming, for the sea turtles, vaquitas,
Snow leopards, monarchs….
When at last I spoke up,
I was only a ghost on the wind.
Roger Stoll lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and has published articles, book reviews and political poetry in Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Internationalist 360, Jewschool, Marxism-Leninism Today, MintPress News, MRonline, New Verse News, Orinoco Tribune, Popular Resistance, Resumen Latinoamericano, San Francisco Examiner, and ZNet.
Read other articles by Roger.
This article was posted on Sunday, November 21st, 2021 at 8:02am and is filed under Poetry.
