Cry of a wounded mother
What
have you done, my children of various colours, races, creeds and regions?
You
have not spared your first mother? Primeval mother that sustains civilizations
across time-space continuum. A mother
that sustains your own biological mothers, fathers, families? Ungrateful lot!
You have destroyed the mother earth, individually and collectively, via your
acts of vandalism
amounting
to slow murder?
Your
greed for more profits ruined my face. You killed the soil with chemicals and
pesticides for better yields. Razed mountains and hills for sand and other
building materials for swanky homes. Poisoned the rivers and oceans, choking
the aquatic life to death there. Massacred rain-forests that loosened the top
soils and activated floods.
Your
vehicles and home alliances filled the skies with toxic air.
Any
act of ignorance would have been forgiven by me, the most tolerant mother but
you all knew and never cared for the consequences of
wanton
destruction in the name of progress
Now
the gods have fled from the forests, rivers, mountains, dales and rivers.
They
are angry with the ungrateful mortals.
The
divine wrath will be visiting too soon.
Again.
And again.
Convulsions.
Putrid air.
Grey
vaults. Fires.
There
will be more floods and famines.
Oceans
will warm up.
No
winter in winters
No
summer in summers.
There
will be snow in the desert
Desert
in the snow!
And
very little water.
Only
yellow haze across the planet
And
high or freezing temperatures.
Search
Above
the clusters of towers
a
bird soars through the smog,
desperately
searching for a tree
that
once was her home
but
bulldozed last night by a greedy
bungalow-owner
for light and vertical growth
in
a dense Delhi neighborhood.
Roar
The
summer drains
choked
with debris
assume
the riverine form
in
the monsoon
and
floods
the areas
with
fury---at being
abused
by
the citizens.
Sunil Sharma