Questions for us

Our fellow species on this earth
are magnificent, eccentric beasts,
creations of evolution
over many millennia.

Why do we not respect them more,
these other wondrous forms of life?

Why do we murder them for food,
or willy-nilly for pleasure,
burn the woods and steppes they live in,
pour chemicals and shit into
the rivers and lakes where they swim?

Why do we poison the water,
so necessary for all life,
pollute the air we and they breathe?

Why are we recklessly driving
us all to shameful extinction?

My poems grow like a tree

My poems grow like a tree,
ideas germinate
in the mind’s fertile soil:
tonal words with meaning
emerge, and like fresh shoots,
sprout into rhythmic lines.

New thoughts, new directions
spread their roots, their tendrils,
lo, a metaphor forms—
a freshly budding bough—
and an image blossoms
like a fragrant flower.

Alliterations buzz
like summer bumblebees
in my ecstatic ear—
a perfected picture
with transcendent music,
painted with few words.

What color was coral

What color was coral,
now all bleached white?

Multihued it was, once,
before the oceans warmed
and turned more acidic
from all that CO2
we spew into the air,
expelling the algae
living in its polyps
in symbiotic love.

The algae turn toxic,
the coral reefs whither,
nature is diminished,
and beauty is destroyed.

We have done it again.

Homo postcoronavirus

We are all premature corpses:
death masks now cover our faces
as we walk around like zombies,
not touching, feeling or hugging
our fellow ghost-like creatures.

We quake with the frigid frisson
of fear that we might just crumble
into viral dust with the next breath.

At night we return to our tombs
of anxiety and terror,
and wake to morbid statistics.

Will there be at least one Adam
and one Eve who survive this plague
to spawn a new kind of being?
¬
One, who will treat this world better,
not destroy its fellow species,
the land, sea and air all around,
a wiser and kinder human,
Homo postcoronavirus.

The nightmare of nihil

The nightmare of nihil
that incorporeal,
non-sentient status,
where the body decays
and one barely exists
in the minds of loved ones,
and only till they die,
or perhaps as a name
engraved on a tombstone,
a row of letters,
the rich life forgotten,
all washed away by time—
that is everyone’s fate,
so live out this dream
hedonistically,
enjoy it while you can!