Again Thinking

The headlines speak again of war and natural disasters.

Add the human designed suicide bombers and we can say we live in normal times.

The United Nations is again speaking of the need for peace and sustainable development. That too is normal as that is what it was designed to do.

Policy makers worldwide are busy making policy. And all admit that this policy is geared towards the well being of nations, peoples and the world.

So why is it that there is so much conflict, uncertainty and suffering in the world today, and yet more on the horizon?

Is it that humans are biologically driven to conflict and destruction by their evolutionary past where only the toughest and meanest survived?

Is war and destruction a result of unsustainable populations eking out lives on meagre resources or is it due to the unfair distribution of these resources? Perhaps our misuse of nature and its bounties in the recent past has hastened and magnified the condition. Are we at or fast approaching the point of no return? Or is it that destruction of humans by other humans is merely the representation of our cultural diversity and therefore there is nothing to be done?

Questions, questions.


Resurrection

shades in the black night confess eyes
we come within seconds of total light.
something palls and no affirmation comes -
we have seen tenderness as leaves
unfolding into the morning light,
watched with vengeance, seen the play
straining into the darkest night,
resisted human love as roots
that grow between carefully welded days,
denied hopeful beginnings the right of life
and prayed for some sort of rain.
we have heard thunder speak its anger
cringed before its scorching tongue,
lost all and reduced to nothing
found human tenderness in love unsung.

else resilience impregnates our wounds.
we resist only till the core is breached.
when love dies there is no imagining
the hardness a human heart can reach.


from After the Hard Hours, This Rain, Woodrose Publications, Singapore 1975.