Nature Ignored

Nature Ignored



The treads of boots

leave prints in the snow,

banked softly in the quietness

of dark pines.

Looking down from high

the trees say nothing.

Resting through winter,

waiting for the Spring sap surge.



The jagged boulder

in the middle of the path,

another kill-site for Winter,

could easily upend us

bringing death everywhere.



Silence dominates our broken feathers.

From blood in snow.

The echo we cannot hear.



No memory weaves our mind,

static speaking over media chatter.

Too busy counting the death of pandemic,

while greenhouse gas infiltrates our lungs

and thus we are broken.



No voice beyond the senselessness

of this COVID death

just burning bodies in the frigid dark

ripping open without a chance.



No longer do we speak of seasons

or notice the flight of geese.

There is only death

frozen in the forest.

Without sense of the loss

we blindly suffer

and decline to pick up the phone.



Locked down sterile humans,

unable to procreate,

have now become the myth.

Everything else arounds us,

stretching their own lives.

Trees, rivers, rocks, oceans and mountains

survive in our absence.



The oceans are lost to our minds,

as we ignore

the language of whales calling.

Unable to hear their range of symphony.



Boot prints in the snow

are all we left behind.

Ian Prattis

 

Ian Prattis, Zen Teacher, Anthropology Professor Emeritus, peace and environmental activist, was born in the UK. He has spent much of his life living and teaching in Canada. His moving and eye-opening books, essays and poetry are a memorable experience for anyone who enjoys reading about primordial tendencies. Beneath the polished urban facade remains a part of human nature that few want to acknowledge, either due to fear or simply because it is easier to deny the basic instincts that have kept us alive on an unforgiving earth. Prattis bravely goes there in his outstanding literary work. A stone tossed in the waters of life.