by H.G. Peterson

While I was Strolling in a Park

Cultures may collapse and go for many diverse reasons:
Poor crop growth and yield due to the colder winter seasons;
Ignorant they don’t adapt to climate alteration;
As a result of conquest or extreme deforestation

Consider Easter Island with its famous statue heads
Once a complex society but mostly wound up dead
Getting rid of all the trees might once have seemed a notion
Yet here they now are gone because of massive soil erosion

Norse Greenland held promise because Vikings loved to farm
And little did they realize that cute sheep would do them harm
Constant fights with Inuit, the chilling of the Earth
After 1300 of the Vikings there’s a dearth

Mayans were before our time a mighty New World nation
The ones who had a proud and literate civilization
Some war, some drought, some fighting in the proudest noble classes
Leaves nothing of the Maya but poor ruins under grasses

And of course this modern world still faces these same troubles
Will our cities all endure, or will they end in rubble?
Environment and population problems must be solved
Lest we all die out for our failure to stand and evolve

We will see if we can reach a pinnacle most high
Or if like the ol’ Aztecs we’ll collapse and then all die