Fatal Flaw

The city air was late nights dipped in coffee, early mornings on public transport just as the sun is rising.

Air fresh and bright and melancholy, too;
a note of the irreversibly human, which might have been beautiful,
but instead was a bleach stain on the purple twilit sky. 

The irreversible impacts of the hamartia of humanity, is what I mean.     

The greed, the desperate need for more.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the emissions get higher.
And richer, and poorer, and higher.

I think perhaps we’re beautiful, but our hamartia is an insatiable, unquenchable thirst:

A relentless need to be bigger and better, bigger and better;
to fulfill all that genius which we possess, and create, and create.

But also because of a greed—money, in turn, power—and a craving for all those things which are so awfully convenient, so terribly accessible.

Each year, Pacific Islands are being swallowed up in water,
the millions of tonnes of pollution in our atmosphere creep higher,

new coal mines miraculously appear despite
vague promises for some eventual transition to renewables.

Yet look at those city lights at night-time.