University of the District of Columbia, Washington DC
Koala and Judases
Sculpture: Komala, the Koala by Australian poet, painter, sculptor, Elizabeth 'Lish' Škec
Mean, mean people slowly unwrap like sundry snake skins. I welcomed them so I hold culpability. They slither away leaving me to create, tend, love, rear a new skin, over and over. Judases. The forest is desiccated and fragile. Perfect for a fire. And I don’t smoke. I see your smoky footprints in my backyard, sore and fiery, leaving me to douse these with my own skin, my own fabrics, my own rush, over and over. See my skin, my bark, my leaves, my tiny legs heaped in layers on the sun’s anchor. Judases. I see wisdom knocking on my door, solidly, repetitively. I see the residues from rampant wildfires spill just outside my abode. I see you and others cooking on those very dangerous embers. Judases. I don’t watch. I observe. I look pointedly. That’s my job. Like the Gods of all religions observing us. I may look short and cute, yet I thrive on tall Eucalyptus that your pettiness can never reach. Unless you burn the trees. I can live long except for your foolhardiness that lights a match or pulls along in old, smelly rags your diseases with the intent to devastate and kill. I’m forced to be your sins. Your narcissism. Your juvenile behavior protruding like Pinocchio’s nose. Judases.
Humans and Extinctions
The last fledgling was born just before humans came along to burn history. Boulders yawned with wide open mouths and let out ecstatic, climatic, high pitched sounds. The skies were eerily discreet with hands behind ears trying hard to decipher inaudible echoes that reverberated in the leaden, dreary, water filled clouds. A kind of protracted, daunting humming could be heard miles away, and rain was beginning to fall uniform and demonstrative, falling into new rivers being charted at the confluence of liquids, heat, oxygen and mud.Tall standing Megalania hit their chests, drumming the birth shower to an end as mom and fledgling watched the regalia reach its crescendo. The mom perched above the baby completing the shedding of the amniotic fluid, and perched even higher above the cacophony, anxious and vexed, ready to pounce and gobble any extinct predators emerging from abrasions in dimensions. Mom and fledgling both angled cautiously, their eyesight acute and fully awake observing the humans igniting the match. Genyornis vanished soon after.
Flame and Escape
The flame of the forest by Indian poet, painter and photographer, Madhumita Sinha
I don’t watch or read news after eighteen hundred hours. It feels more inhospitable, bleak, stark. During the day I find myself wading with those who died or lost someone to gun violence, murders, accidents, diseases, rapes. I writher, shiver, sometimes stare vacantly into nothingness trying to be them or their families. Why is humanity on a headstand even when blood clots pack tight the reasoning grids? If it’s challenging to bring myself home later what about those who were on the news? It’s the heart that God could have made differently so that suffering could be painted numb. We could have roamed in the corridors of the brain still being innovative, yet our hearts could have been just pumping like many Datas. Some would call that surviving, not living. Misguided or not, Data too wanted to be human. The other day, after turning off the television, after folding the morning newspaper, after dinner with family, I sat on the balcony overlooking the ocean vistas sipping Baileys on the rocks. Oh, the prim and proper, and luxury of the selected few. Not millionaires by any chance, though still very lucky. We are in the thick of winters yet the grazing of chilly winds on our lanai furniture upon which my body rests, cools my cinching heart. Young herring seagulls were flying towards the South while the older congregated nearer home. I too am aging yet primary red, blue, green and yellow are still perky and vivid on paper and in my brain synapses. I hurriedly lay flat the morning newspaper and splash my synaptic nerves upright and wholesome. I could decipher the words and sentences still blinking in the background like distraught ambulances, yet I keep my gaze fixated on the forest flame of my basic insignias with enough room between tree trunks for an escape.
*Data: A character in the television series, Star Trek, The Next Generation.
