Friday 27 July 2012

Protozoa


You think of them grappling
Little monsters in a drop of water –
Whipping flagella, thrusting pseudopodia
In a slow dance of life and death –

Splitting, eating, consuming
Living, dying, without ever knowing
Of such things as air, or the sky
Or even that they are alive.

Monsters in a drop of water
Crawling on a grain of sand
Blindly thrusting, living, dying, ignorant, alone.

It's so easy to destroy them.
Pour in a drop of an acid and they're gone.
It’s easy to feel contempt, easy to feel
Superior, exalted, above it all –

Sitting here in this drop of air
Covering a little rock turning round a minor sun
Surrounded by billions of others,
Existing a moment, now here, now gone
In the wink of a cosmic eye.

It's easy to feel exalted over 
The monsters in the drop of water
Who eat to live, and struggle to survive.
While the exalted make war on each other
And poison the waters and the air
To make things like plasma screen TV,
And fashionable gloves.

It’s easy, to drop bombs and make speeches
About freedom and democracy. Easy 
To destroy in the name of progress
To wipe out in the name of need
And economic growth.

Maybe the monsters in the drop of water 
Might have things to say
About who the real monsters are.



 Copyright B Purkayastha 2012

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