We bought, we sold,
conquered cruel, took
through our hubris,
built our wealth
and status,
contrived our fancy titles,
enslaved and crafted
bloody empires that spanned
rivers and mountains,
deserts and plains.

All for what?
For land.
For grandiose dreams and plans.
Earth yielding to our desires.
Earth from which
we came, now parcelled up as
land.

Land on which to grow and
sustain, and create generations,
and mythologies and
long histories that inspire truth,
and from which to drive our
spiritual yearnings
towards some belief
that there is more
beyond this patch of dirt.

Land that became the place to
roam, tribalise,
then stop roaming to move
to cultivation, to tame species,
to establish so-called civilisation,
with power and society,
suckled on these
landscapes and regions,
that we named and called
our owh,
as if the earth
could give up its title.

Land on which humans have
dreamed progress and
created expansions and
technologies derived
roughly from
the ground that sits
beneath their feet
as they had visions
towards the stars.

Long before this self-aware
species trod the paths of settlement
and country and drew
the stable and shifting boundaries
that include and divide,
and made their sacred flags
to wave in jingoism,
there was
earth, not land,
not a once-forgotten
paradise but a rock
thrown by the universe.

Earth, the preserve of all species,
mystery made,
that come and go across eons,
that sit recorded in the rocks,
and we, this species that
presumes a special place beyond
all others, announce our
timeless importance
in myths about ourselves
when time is ticking down ,
and we, perhaps,
must give up our place
at the centre of
our world ,
or realise it was
never ours to have.

For the earth is the
earth as it ever was,
and is not land,
is not country,
is not titled,
is not a right
even if contrived around
regions and countries,
principalities, places and powers,
and it knows nothing of
wars and alliances,
and it waits in silence for us
to have our way,
and it cares not for us beyond
what it provides all creatures
who are born and live and die
on the mountains,
in the valleys,
on the deserts,
and in the surging seas.

The earth belongs to all of us and none,
but is borrowed in existence
and given up for another
when all of us
shall die
and take our inevitable place
in earth or sky
from whence we came.

 

12/7/2023