Poem: "New Eden"
This poem came out of the September 6, 2011 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from moonwolf1988 and my_partner_doug. It was sponsored by Shirley and Anthony Barrette. This poem is set in my main science fiction universe and relates the fate of one of its many colonies.
New Eden
The colonists left Earth
because they did not like
"nature red in tooth and claw."
They wanted to make a fresh start
in a new, green world
with no killing in it.
They brought along their crops,
and some beneficial insects,
but not the pests.
They brought along pets and livestock,
but only the herbivores,
not the carnivores or omnivores.
The terraforming worked
and the colonists populated the planet
with all the good things they had brought.
For a time, everything went well,
but then they began to notice
a flaw here, an imbalance there.
They wondered what could have gone wrong,
when after all, they had left
the pests and parasites back on Earth.
Some crops flourished
and began to act like weeds,
while others withered away.
The herbivores escaped,
devouring fields and gardens,
numbers exploding only to crash later.
Then the human population
suffered the same fate,
bodies dwindling, birth rate dropping.
When the archaeologists later discovered
the failed colony, they declared the cause of death:
unnatural selection.