Sorry, there’s no more horns-a-plenty.
Every self-driving-avocado-blockchain-paeleo-nootropic
took a forest, a species, a river dam(n)ed.
Every new screen flattened a mountain.
It’s never been gathering but taking:
our monkey-paw grasp
ever exceeded our reach.
Armies
marching
for
the
very
last
sun-
dried
sul-
-tana.
Image: Death Comes to the Banquet Table (Memento Mori), circa 1635, by Giovanni Martinelli, via Wikimedia Commons. A quadrille for dverse where Lillian has asked us to use the word ‘gather’. A quadrille is a poem with exactly 44 words (admittedly I took a few liberties with the hyphen – but 44 words it is). And in keeping with this gloomy spirit, here’s Phoebe Killdeer and the Short Straws with The Fade Out Line (the video is a hoot :-))
Peter Frankis writes 
Hyphenated words do indeed count as 1 word……poetic license granted here 🙂 .. and you do it so well. “No more horns-a-plenty here” — not that is indeed a powerful statement in terms of my thinking, as I jump from there to the desecration of our earth, farmlands, etc and you march toward the end of the Good Earth here….
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Thanks Lillian,
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How uncomfortably true.o
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I like the distinction between gathering and taking.
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I love this… though dark… there is an end to all abundance. Our specie has a way of shooting ourselves in the foot. (we both used cornucopia in the title)…
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Thanks Bjorn, yes seeing your quadrille helped mine – was reading an article at the time on the ‘top 10 species about to go extinct’ next to a piece about reducing cholesterol. Blackness ensued.
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every new screen flattened a mountain…
Yep. Yep, yep, yep.
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You’re right – the video is a hoot! And it made the second reading of your quadrille so much more effective, if that’s possible. The form gives a sinking feeling to your words as they sink.
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So glad you enjoyed (if that’s the right word) it.
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We both chose mankind’s destructive treatment of the earth — and each other — for this ‘gather’ quadrille. The verb should be a joyous one, but in practice, I’m not so sure. Seems our species is too competitive to make the verb anything more than a voracious mob. This is so effective in form how at the end you are down to one-word and half-word lines yet we’re still fighting each other tooth and nail for every last scrap (I had to look up sultana, but love the imagery of the small and shriveled.) Very well done, Peter.
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Thanks Amaya (sorry for the culturally specific reference to the sultana :-)) and absolutely agree.
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Truly dark and darkly true. I love the voice with subtle ( or not so subtle) sarcasm. We have made our choices. The effects of technology and the greedy mishandling of this earth will be our demise, I’m sure.
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Thanks – I hope we’re wrong – but I doubt it.
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Appreciate your deep reflection here: It’s never been gathering but taking:
our monkey-paw grasp
ever exceeded our reach.
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