Mother Nature and Water, the Elixir of Life
The desert waits
For the brief rain of spring
The whole year long;
Quickly flowers
With beautiful trees
In no time at all.
All the creatures big and small
Suddenly come to life,
Out of their hibernation:
Birds break out of their eggs,
Butterflies out of their pupae,
The locusts the arid land swarm
And eat up the entire crop
Are so abundant that they in the sky
A dark cloud form,
Which moves altogether
Humming its love song...
They all come alive
To celebrate the brief shower
Of precious drops of life...
The parched earth eagerly
Absorbs the life giving drops
Of the same water, to collect which,
Women with earthen pots,
Precariously perched on their heads,
Still walk for miles and miles,
Day after day,
The whole years long,
In many parts of the world-
The deserts of Rajasthan
The Thar, the Kalahari and in Arbistan...
The frozen ice, the mother of river,
In the snow cap of the arctic
Melts when the spring arrives
Penguins walk, after their wintry hatch,
Of precious eggs- leaving them to their mates
to warm- to the water edge in the sea,
A mammoth journey of a hundred and fifty miles
To feed at the ocean bed.
The sea so bountiful,
Gives the essential food...
Water, water, the giver of life
Water, water, the elixir of life...
The hump-baked whale
Starts to travel early in the spring
The long journey of eight thousand miles
Encircles close, closing in on its prey
In the collective hunt of sardines and cray fish
Producing their characteristic whistling sounds-
Like the war cry of the Indians...
The sea doves fly thousands of miles
To come and lay their eggs on the peaks
Find a dry and cozy patch of land,
And hatch in abundance their young,
Who when born scurry to the water to feed
Not knowing yet how to fly,
While the hawks in the sky
Watch them with an expert eye
And swoop down to catch, the young and naive
new hatchlings by their necks....
They also find their meals at the water's edge.
Water, water, the giver of life,
Water, water, the sustainer of life....
The entire Earth vies for water
And fights for its survival...
The time is brief, the activity in abundance,
For which all the creatures prepare well in advance.
Life sustains itself in Nature
Everything lives in perfect symbiosis,
In perfect Harmony...
Why can't we
Save the essential, natural habitat
Nature has bestowed upon us?
All living beings adapt themselves
To the climatic changes, brief but essential
And we human beings want the weather
To adapt itself to us...
Why can't we, instead, adapt our selves to it?
Like all living creatures do?
Author: Zoya Zaidi
Aligarh (UP), India
Copyright ©: Zoya Zaidi
20.03.2008, The World Earth and Water Day
Poetry by Zoya Zaidi
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Editors' choiceWritten on 2008-06-01 at 18:23
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