Once Bereft
By Robert Witmer | Tokyo, Japan
This haibun was first published in Drifting Sands Haibun, Issue 15.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left
— Gerard Manly Hopkins, “Inversnaid”
From Pangaea to the Tethys Sea our Mother Earth goes round, and round our central star appears, the Sun, traveling east to west, from Ethiopia to Hesperides, each day a blessing in this circle of life. Brought into this vital light with plants of every kind and fauna filling land and sea, fruitful, we were. And it was good.
We crept into caves to mark the walls with ochred images of creatures honored for their flesh, their spirit and being, different from our own, yet of the same.
The First Peoples made their homes, dressing their bodies, teaching their tongues, cherishing their kinship with the land.
We learned to turn the very Earth, the oldest of our gods, with plows, back and forth, year after year, reaping, sowing, wearing away the immortal, the seemingly inexhaustible land we would one day forget. And so, as our numbers rose and our cities grew and our knowledge fed our need for power, we tamed and conquered all. Or so we thought we would, quick, ready, resourceful humankind, now more human, less kind, kinship reduced to a great machine.
Our hearts cooled, the Earth warmed, we saw no end in sight. Round and round, each fight, another victory. And then we mastered space itself, we landed on the moon. What sight! The Earth in space – “a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void.” A blue dot where we are all one people, living in one world, together in our need to keep this improbable home home to all creation in all its diversity, its fragile beauty, our one and only home.
morning dew
the little birds
on a rhino’s back
This piece has been published as part of the collection, Clouds in Paper.
Cover Image by Benjamin Voros via Unsplash
