Eerie Silence

They cultivated her for their needs only. She gave and gave. They plundered, looted, trampled, trashed, blasted, drilled, squeezed her resources relentlessly.

She tried to protest, shake, and shrug off the ravaging onslaught. They rubbished her at terra firma, rubbished her in the depths, not sparing her highest peaks.

The insensitive entitled ones continued to poison every square inch of her body to get that little bit more. Never satisfied, they used harmful poisons, fertilizers and pesticides. They bored down on her when she withheld benevolent showers. They blasted her quarries, denuded her forests, as they built up their castles of stone and wood.

She warned them. She quaked, sometimes raged, and she went frigid and hot. She dried up the world. Sometimes, she rained copious tears upon them, flooded their homes and doused their hearths. They found temporary fixes.

The mighty ones stayed cool in the freon aided bubble, happily uncaring of the CFC pollutants. Tankers supplied them water gotten from borewells. Diseases and infection spread, the poorest folk were hit hardest.

The nightingales sang no more. Sparrows disappeared, and extinct went several creatures. “Lowest of the food chain, dispensable,” dismissed the haughty.

They ignored vultures and crows circling upon carcasses and garbage, as resources became scarcer, and the place reeled with drought.

Antibiotic resistance brought into focus fraility of humans.

“Mother,” she scoffed, “they called me Mother Earth.”

Disaffected, she watched them. First they came for the meek, and no one said anything. “They act like I need them, but the fools do not know ’tis the other way around,” she mumbled.

One by one, they dropped like flies, and suddenly the world went quiet. Too quiet.

Mother switched off the lights and took a long refreshing nap she finally deserved.