Dear Future Generations: Sorry

“Dear Future Generations: Sorry” is written and performed by Prince Ea. It is a spoken word piece framed as an address to those who will live on Earth in the future and thus inherit the current planetary destruction at the hand of humanity and climate change. Performed and published in 2015, the poem is a timely piece, published one year prior to the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement in April of 2016–an accord that covers climate change mitigation and was signed by 192 states. The poem is performed in the style of a list poem in which several ideas are listed to make the speaker’s point that climate change is a real and pressing issue.

Prince Ea is a speaker, filmmaker, spoken word artist and creator who often engages in complicated, controversial topics. Highly influenced by hip-hop, Prince Ea often uses rhyme, rhythm, and musical chords and beats in his spoken word pieces to create a sense of mood and tone, for the reader and listener. This technique is applied in “Dear Future Generations: Sorry,” which is written largely as a lament at the destruction of the Earth, namely due to money, power, and greed.

Published just months before Prince Ea’s “MAN vs EARTH,” another spoken word piece that tackles and explores humanity’s relationship to the environment, “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” engages and explores climate change, a topic of particular interest to Prince Ea...

Poet Biography

Best known by his performance name Prince Ea, Richard Williams was born on the North side of Saint Louis, Missouri on September 16, 1988. Prince Ea attended The University of Missouri—Saint Louis and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in Anthropology. He is known for promoting values such as intelligence, free thought, unity, and creativity in his work., Prince Ea erupted onto the hip-hop scene with the “Make S.M.A.R.T. Cool” movement, where “S.M.A.R.T.” stands for “Sophisticating Minds and Revolutionizing Thought.”

Prince Ea began his career in the hip-hop world as a rapper, but shifted the focus of his music to spoken word poetry in 2014. Prince Ea has since reached a global audience with his films and content, and along with hip-hop, he credits spiritual texts like the Tao Te Ching and Bhagavad Gita as sources for his poetic and artistic inspiration.  He works across a range of mediums, from singing and hip hop, to spoken word and filmmaking.

Prince Ea is a popular figure on social media, with his spoken word YouTube and Facebook videos amassing over a billion collective views. More than a social media sensation, Prince Ea regularly engages with difficult, thought-provoking topics such as race, environmentalism, and even spirituality. He regularly speaks and performs in person at conferences, high schools and colleges, talking to youth on topics such as self-development and living one’s passion.

Poem Text

Prince Ea. “Dear Future Generations: Sorry.” 2015. PoemHunter.

Summary

In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker speaks “for the rest of us” (Line 2), opening the poem with an apology to future generations living on Earth for leaving behind a “mess of a planet” (Line 3). The speaker continues with a  list of what the speaker is apologizing for and why the current generation let the destruction of the Earth reach such a dire point, including self-centeredness, excuses, inaction, and ignorance. The speaker asks for the listener’s forgiveness, likening the current generation’s relationship with the Earth to a bad marriage.

In the second stanza, the speaker gives examples of this destruction, speaking about the “Amazon Desert” (Line 12) which was once the Amazon Rainforest. The speaker outlines how the current generation is burning and clearing them away, and suddenly realizes that the listener does not know about trees. With this realization, the speaker elaborates on how “amazing” (Line 18) trees are for humanity, speaking to their healing qualities and natural ability to “clean up our pollution” (Line 20), “store and purify water” (line 21), and produce medicines. The speaker regretfully informs the listener that the trees have all been cut down, burned, at a rate of 50% “in the last 100 years” (Line 28). The speaker rhetorically asks “Why?” (Line 29), and responds [in the video] by holding up a 100 dollar bill.

The third stanza continues this thought, lamenting the irony of the leaves depicted on the 100 dollar bill, as the speaker then moves on to a childhood memory. The speaker remembers learning about Native Americans felt responsible “for the next 7 generations” (Line 35), contrasting this with an observation that most modern people “don’t even care about tomorrow” (Line 36). The speaker again apologies for greed, desire for profit, abusing nature, causing extinction, and stealing the future from the listener. The speaker apologizes that their generation seems to equate “Progress” (Line 47) with “destruction” (Line 46).

In stanza four, the speaker addresses the news channel “Fox News” (Line 48), challenging their climate change skepticism, daring the channel and Sarah Palin to interview homeless people in Bangladesh and Beijing whose lives have been disrupted by “rising sea levels” (Line 53) and pollution. The speaker warns skeptics that “it can be denied, not avoided” (Line 57), and returns to apologizing for the negative impact his generation has had on nature by ignoring the warning signs and focusing on war.

Cutting himself off at the end of the fourth stanza, the speaker shifts the tone in the fifth stanza, as the speaker states, “You know what, cut the beat, I’m not sorry” (Line 65). Suddenly, the speaker takes on a defiant tone and is not apologetic anymore. Instead, the poem begins a call to action, asking the present-day reader–the current generation–to react rather than remain passive. Using the metaphor of a farmer rooting out disease in a tree, the speaker states, “We are the root, we are the foundation, this generation / It is up to us to take care of this planet, / It is our only home, we must globally warm our hearts / And change the climate of our souls” (Lines 76-79). In line 82, the speaker observes that a betrayal of nature is a betrayal of humanity, and the poem ends with a warning that no matter what cause the listener is passionate about, if this call to action is not heeded, “we will all be equally extinct” (Line 89). Returning to the apology, Prince Ea concludes the poem with a single word, “Sorry” (Line 90), implying that climate change is the listener’s responsibility, too.