Our Existence

Relentlessly persistent, challenging the
pale envelope of our frail existence, the
scourges of pestilence, endemic disease,
poverty, human exploitation and atrocities
counteracting all that civilization has
achieved in its bid to balance human
fallibility and Nature's incessant trials
through her dread and feared emissaries.

Should not human conscience prevail in
recognition of others' rights to humane
survival? But no, it is a sorry fallacy that
we care and strive to exert ourselves for the
solacing aspirational comforts of the entirety
for that achieved would most certainly
diminish our own futures of comfort and
entitled convenience beyond plenitude.

We are not shamed by our firm grip on
scarce resources, remaining steadfastly
entitled. Enter Nature, to further complicate
the equation of distance between abysmal
need and conspicuous plenty. As pitiless,
scorching heat from which a parched
landscape is offered no release, and no
relief beyond bare subsistence, the vast
legions of supplicants' prayers unanswered.

Hot and angry winds loose arable soil
into desertified, yawning spaces of absolute
loss. Elsewhere, the draining heat and wind
fell the weak and the elderly, and dread, dry
lightning ignites the landscape to a burning
inferno, shrivelling all life forms into grey
ash; bitter and final, acridly moribund.

The wide, blue heavens become darkly
occluded with menacing clouds blown in by
monsoon winds, uniting in a deadly symbiosis
of deathly peril, drowning the landscape
below, and all that existed there. Forests,
fields, cultivated crops, fruit-bearing trees
and shrubs, paddy fields and herds of
ruminants, destroyed. Raging floodwaters
generously floating down a mad trajectory
the flotsam of farms, buildings, cattle,
wildlife and children torn from parents'
desperate hold; they destined to follow.

This is the world inhabited by humankind,
usefully forgetful of catastrophic disasters
when the wild shaking of the Earth's carapace
over its molten core has been stilled, when
the white-hot disruption of volcanoes subside,
when tsunamis once again sedately settle,
and time and tide, fire, earth and water
reinstate for the nonce a semblance of trusting
malleability and incautious forgetfulness.