What Will It Take?

Sitting in the quiet darkness of early morning.
That time of day when the gentle, white lace of frost
Caresses the grass and paints with delicate strokes upon windows.

My mind wanders paths strewn with the blown litter of oak and maple.
The creaks and cracks of the naked branches above as the gently breezes
Flow among their gnarled fingers.

And, I wonder…

Where does the sand in the glass go when it completes its task?
Time leaks into time with no direction other than Onward.

At what point do we stop and look around at our purposes and desires?
See! The Indigenous Peoples of the Earth have stories to tell.
Destroyers appeared on the horizon.
Pestilence, life Passes, Peoples Perish.

My mind sees a shadow on the plains.
Millions upon millions of stamping hooves.

Silenced.

People, lives, cultures…Gone.

I see the dense canopy of a billion leaves swaying in the wind,
Dripping the Elixir of Life, Water, onto the world of myriad creatures.

Fire; destruction; Death.

Everyday I see the result of greed and lust in vacant eyes and bleached bones.

When will we learn?

As the poet wrote,

any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

John Donne Meditation XVII

I wrote the above as I considered our headlong leap into environmental disaster. Many people give no credence to the alarms sounded by people in the scientific community and elsewhere. We really don’t have to look beyond the Indigenous Peoples of the world. When the colonists came and destroyed their habitat, the cultures perished. Even as some Indigenous nations attempt to recapture their cultures and languages, they will be forever changed. And, not necessarily for the better.
What makes us so arrogant as to think that we will escape unscathed as we destroy our own environment?