In the middle of a winter night

I wake up drenched in my own sweat

While the room temperature remains stable and cold,

I wipe my forehead and slide back under the blanket

Wondering while the weather, chill

Where the wings of fans in most homes would hang still,

What can make ‘a peacefully snoring Indian’ perspire?

Alas, in the morning I read about ‘The Australian Bushfire’

Yet Roaring like an answer to the devil’s prayer!

 

Climatic change?

What a felony!

Newton’s Third Law a blasphemy?

Then why is it always only animals that suffer

The reactions of all our technological measure?

 

Long long ago we protested Global Warming.

Next decade, we got busy learning Organic Farming!

Upgrade in concern seems a must,

Since humans have begun to wear tears like lust!

We are the species capable of mass destruction

That knows the consequences yet take no precautions!

Ah, it’s clear our knowledge we acquire

Come from the venomous talking wire

That once tempted to taste the hanging fruit

From ‘The Forbidden Roots’!

Thrown out of Eden, losing the paradise,

We breed here as creative parasites!

 

Unlimited Emissions of Unwanted Energies

Secreted in the five elements, become modern man’s duty!

Have already strangled the seas, choked the bees

But tonight there burns many millions of native species!

 

“We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil;

Our home is girt by sea;

Our land abounds in nature’s gifts

Of beauty rich and rare” –

Words I’ve heard when Aussies sang

Gives my nerves now a pang!

 

While innocent lives in Kangaroo Nation being barbecued,

We the meat balls should be Thanos and not Groot!

 

Smoking causes cancer – we say

Aye, we’re the cancer causing smoke today

Opening the hunting land with the minimum alive

For feral cats and red foxes survived!

 

Into the sacred fire, in the ancient times

So many animals did we sacrifice…

Now in the scientific pyre,

More or the less the same we exercise!

 

Charred are the marsupials, wombats,

Bristle birds, Corroboree frog and all the insects,

Mountain pygmy possum and Potoroos

Like our Gods, to live in Textbooks!

 

Just as animals need habitats,

To go on, habitats need its animals too –

Is one of the commandments

The naked monkeys know but not follow!

 

Looks like the months of blazing

Has led the bush-fire heat my skin.

Hush, this flame so alarming:

No More is this mere season thing!

 

Record-breaking heat, Lightning strikes, Record-breaking drought,

Positive Indian Ocean Dipole, Alleged arson…

When will we take the medication

Having invented enough reasons?

 

The cries of the sky-touched trees,

The steam from the dying eyes,

Evaporate my sleep

Hopping through these ash color nights!

 

Alas, we are the tribe that kill God

To save the religion!

We are the scientists stabbing trees

For selling oxygen!!

 

Earth is the new hell

With so many ugly furnace!

Let’s agree, We are all Hornless Devils,

Beneath the surface!!!

                                                                                              ~ M Mrithika Santhoshini

                                                                                              Coimbatore, India