Capitalism Killed Us
Poetry & Prose by Britt Wolfe
The world did not burn in a single day.
It frayed—
thread by thread,
greed gnawing at the seams
while we kept buying silence
in plastic wrappers.
We thought profit was progress,
called extraction innovation,
named ruin as growth.
The smoke rising from our factories
was only the hymn of the future,
we told ourselves,
as rivers choked and skies
turned the colour of rust.
And when the end came,
it wore no fanfare—
only shelves stripped bare,
oceans sour with plastic,
the last birds circling
a silence too wide to measure.
Capitalism killed us,
not with one swift blow
but with the endless gnaw
of want turned weapon.
It sold us our own undoing,
labelled it freedom,
and we paid gladly,
receipt after receipt,
until nothing was left
but ash and invoices
for a future that never arrived.
Now the earth holds its breath,
fields grown feral with memory,
cities gutted,
the bones of our towers
jutting like accusations
into a sky finally unowned.
And somewhere in the silence,
a question lingers,
sharp as broken glass:
what else could we expect,
when we traded survival
for the glitter of a currency
that could never feed us,
never save us,
never love us back?
KEEP MY WORDS ALIVE
If this poem has stayed with you, you can help keep my words alive or explore more of my work. Every bit of support helps carry the stories forward.
