We Called It Progress

We Called It Progress

First, we straightened the river.

It had wandered too much,


lingering among reeds,


wasting itself on reflections.


We taught it efficiency,


gave it concrete boundaries,
corrected its ancient mistakes.

The fish disappeared,


but quarterly reports improved.

We called it progress.

Then we climbed the hills
and taught the forests their value.

A tree became a chair,


a chair became a product,


a product became a number
rising neatly across a screen.

The birds objected briefly,


then left.

We congratulated ourselves
on reducing unnecessary noise.

We called it progress.

Later,

we found people
 who moved too slowly.

We gave them clocks,


deadlines,


notifications,
and reasons to hurry.

Soon they measured their worth
in productivity graphs
and slept beside glowing reminders
of everything they had not done.

Their exhaustion was remarkable.

We called it progress.

When loneliness spread,


we solved that too.

We built vast digital cities
where everyone could speak at once
and nobody had to listen.

We traded presence for access,
conversation for reaction,
friendship for visibility.

The silence grew crowded.

We called it progress.

Now the river remembers another path.

The forests return only in photographs.


The birds survive as logos.


The people stare into illuminated windows,


searching for something
that once existed without a password.

And at last,


with the water rising around our monuments,


with the screens still glowing,
with our hands full of inventions
and strangely empty of answers,

we find the courage
to name what we have done.

We called it progress.