François Mauld d’Aymée mourns a world where the hum of small, fleeting life has fallen silent, sacrificed to the cold arithmetic of progress and sealed beneath a requiem of pesticides.
The red factory bursts forth
where only the fields once shone.
— Émile Verhaeren
The countryside has draped itself in a moribund silence. The cities bear witness to their last crows and wood pigeons. Turtledoves and blackbirds no longer perch atop the birch trees.
Strange, lonely survivors seem to search for traces of their companions.
We have killed life.
The earth no longer teems with furiously writhing worms; the thickets are no longer filled with the vibrant wings of butterflies. Wherever one looks, wherever one goes, life seems to have fled, and no one seems to know where it now hides.
The grasses appear sad, uninhabited, no longer tormenting women’s calves beneath their fine skirts with swirling insects.
The wild is no more. The insignificant yet so precious, buzzing life of small, flitting creatures has vanished.
All that remains is livestock. Children are taken by noisy school buses to inspect cows, sheep, and mallards, just as they were once brought to the zoo to gaze upon exotic mammals harshly captured in Africa.
Poetry speaks of a world of distracted wanderers, saved from their own awareness by life — the astonishing and deceptively invincible life of yesteryear.
We can now only sing of a world we have killed, one that will never return.
One day, the first pesticide washed over the earth across millions of hectares, and the requiem was pronounced. A scientific requiem, an arithmetical requiem, an engineer’s requiem, written in laboratories — the temples of the new era.
A world that might still live through screens, computers, and light displays but one we will no longer touch or smell. A world that now belongs to legend, with creatures no less mythical than the ancient Pegasus or the Theban centaur.
And the engineer exclaims, with an enthusiastic grimace, his sacred diagram in hand:
“So be it! Amen!”
— Moscow, January 3, 2025
(Translated from the French)
