Mother Nature Will Kill Us All Someday, and I Don’t Blame Her for It

Written By Alex Yamada

Ekphrastic inspired by “To the Light” by Robin Rose Graves

Generation after generation
We took from Gaia
We planted our skyscrapers, where forests once stood
We fractured her skin to dig for crude oil
We killed everything she gave us
Not always for food,
Always for profit
Generation after generation
After generation
We filled her oceans with our trash
Our shit, our poison
One day, she had enough
Gaia began to plant her roots
in us
Drain our blood
Drink our bone marrow
To feed herself
To take from the takers
Until none were left
We should have expected this
someday, after all
we coined the phrase
“The first law of nature,
Kill or be killed”

Alex Yamada

Alex Yamada is a gay man who has experimented with several mediums including painting and photography before settling into writing. He writes mainly poetry, short stories, and more recently, screenwriting.

Alex began writing in high school. After years of bullying in middle school, he found releasing his anger and sadness in poetry to be cathartic, while the teachers often found it concerning, earning his mom a few phone calls. It wasn't until community college in a film studies class that he realized that writing for TV and movies is also a profession. So he started his journey of teaching himself screenwriting, with Microsoft Word no less.

He tends to write on the darker side of humanity; pain, sadness, the demons people wrestle with. These are feelings he grew up with and is comfortable exploring, but he's capable of gallows humor, and a sort of sarcastic wit at times as well. While not everyone appreciates a morbid humor, he knows he's not everyone's cup of tea.

When he does dip back into photography, Alex mainly photographs nature and manipulates the photos into something more whimsical.

Alex has been featured in his community college literary magazine, MSJC's Flight, and at UCR's own Mosaic magazine. His first screenplay Echoes was about a psychic homicide detective. While that's been through a few drafts and incarnations, it is currently shelved, but maybe someday will be revised again, and maybe even make it to a studio for a pitch meeting.

Alex is currently part of an indie short film group that mainly focuses on science fiction. While a bit outside of his usual scope of writing, it's not entirely alien to him. He is currently working on the second draft of a sci-fi romcom (despite having very little experience writing romance or comedy), and could possibly lead to his first film credit!

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