POETS UNITED - SUSTAINABILITY

“We generate our own environment. We get exactly what we deserve. How can we resent a life we’ve created ourselves? Who’s to blame, who’s to credit but us? Who can change it, anytime we wish, but us?” - Richard Bach

Poets United has set a midweek motif that centres on “sustainability”. Is there a poet out there in this world who is not sensitive to this topic? I know that personally, it concerns me greatly. Here is my poem:

The Extraterrestrial

I come to you in peace,

My star so far away,

A pinpoint of light

In your night sky.

I come to your distant world

And find myself in paradise.

I’ve travelled long and far,

Away from the dry deserts

Of my homeland –

An arid planet, red and barren

Where water’s most precious

And wars are fought over a single well.

Your blue-green world

Hanging in space

Like a gemstone, beckoned,

And I came, succumbing

To its gentle insistence

Like a lover’s gaze.

I come to you in peace,

And seek only repose,

The luxury of drinking my fill,

Eating the lush vegetation

With my wide open eyes,

Never sated by the verdant green.

Your oceans brimming with life

Remind me of our distant past –

As our history writes –

When we too inhabited such a world:

Blue-green, drenched, bedewed,

Immersed in crystal waters.

Your forests, drinking the rain

That falls so regularly,

Are priceless beyond compare.

The flowers costlier than jewels bright –

What use to us are our diamonds,

Common as pebbles on my world?

And yet I see vast deserts, here,

I see the rainforests cut, extinction,

Your oceans polluted, animals dying.

The signs are here that you too

Have set a course that will make

Your earth a world like mine.

I come to you in peace,

And seek only a brief respite.

I bring a message from Hell

To your blue-green Eden:

Time runs short, destruction’s close
Unless you become wise, soon…