We Are Witnesses To Our Own Negligence

(The Deluge in Nepal)

We were innocent enough to believe

The mountains stood still,

That stone does not walk.

But when they moved,

The first thing swept downstream

Was not soil, not stone.

It was we,

And the faith we had built on their stillness.

The Himalayas did not melt only their snow;

They turned our negligence into rivers.

The rivers did not leave their banks.

We were the ones who narrowed the shores 

With concrete, with selfishness, 

With greed dressed as growth.

That night,

The water did not knock on any door.

It simply carried away

Whoever stood behind them.

A mother's voice, calling her child's name,

was swallowed mid-syllable by the flood.

Homes folded into the current.

Addresses dissolved.

And with them went

Childhoods, keepsakes,

The courtyard trees,

Even the clocks

That had long since stopped

on the walls, waiting.

This was not nature's revenge.

Nature does not know revenge,

Only consequence.

It was simply laying before us

On one unbearable day,

The wounds we ourselves had carved into it.

The axe that felled the forests

Came home at last to fell our own roof

The machines that split the mountains open

Came crashing, at last, into our own chests.

The walls we built to cage the rivers rose one day

And buried our names beneath them.

And still — is this only a natural disaster?

Or is it an answer long overdue, returned to a humanity

That forgot nature one convenient year at a time?

In the offices of power, files lie out to dry. 

On the maps, the green is still marked untouched.

In speeches,

Development keeps its polish, keeps its shine.

But to a mother sifting the mud

For her child's hand 

What does development mean?

And to whom?

Nature was never our enemy.

It is the first word written into our breath,

The letter we ourselves erased,

And now we ask, bewildered 

why is nature speaking?

The flood in Nepal is not only water

Descending from the Himalayas

It is a sentence,

Written collectively 

by our forgetting,

by our systems' carelessness,

by the ruin we called Progress.

Today, it is Nepal.

Tomorrow

it may be our own village,

our own town, our own city.

The Himalayas still stand.

But already, in their snow,

a fracture is visible in the shape of a future

we have not yet survived

Listen closely:

you can hear it trembling.

If we do not mend that fracture now,

the next flood will not arrive with only mud and water

It will arrive with us as witnesses,

Once again, to our own negligence.

Image Copyright - Varala Anand