By Aarti Balaji
The winning poem at Sympulse '20, poetry slam, Symbiosis Centre for Management Studies' annual youth festival.
Initiate Countdown.
Five.
Remember when they taught us about acid rains?
How the water that falls from the sky is a force of life no more,
But a corrosive poison destroying faces of monuments and people alike?
Well, good news! we don't have to worry about that anymore,
Because what falls from the sky now is not droplets,
But entire flocks of birds,
That set on their annual journey of self preservation,
And ended up in a different destination altogether.
Four.
Great news, guys!
Water shortage will soon cease to be a problem,
As sea levels rise,
You will have the freshness of cold water gripping your feet right as you step out of bed,
Swirling and moaning like souls in the underworld,
The metaphor of fish out of water that our race took too seriously,
And made the ocean itself, into a boiling bowl of dead fish,
Waiting to be devoured further,
Asking us what more is left for us to take from them,
But the joke is on them,
Because human greed is highly creative.
Three.
Water, water everywhere,
Now let's take a step back,
And pray, for a change, for a dry spell,
Please let us know of lands outside of floods again,
And the man at the top says "so it shall be",
But when He gives, He gives with both hands,
And so we enter a world of droughts.
Excess is overwhelming, now let's try absence,
Absence of water from the pores of our skin,
Absence of water from our restaurant outings and takeout nights,
Absence of the metaphors of blood, sweat, and tears.
Hunger pangs wring our stomachs as no water means no food,
No water means no life,
And worse,
No water means madness during the waning moments leading up to the finality of it all.
Two.
There is nothing new about warfare,
People have been fighting over resources forever,
With the rich pulling strings and hoarding everything,
The poor will be no strangers to killing their kin for one drop of life.
But where will the rich go
When there's nothing left to hoard?
They will bring out bigger weapons and kill us all in a frenzy,
Claiming all the while that there is some kind of a black market
Where the earth still thrives,
Where pieces of a parallel universe are sold secretly in the shadows
To people in the know.
But soon they will stand upon the terribly disposed garbage piles of our corpses and realize,
That there's nothing left to steal.
One.
I never believed in a God,
I used to laugh off the end of the world mentioned in the scriptures,
But now?
It seems all too familiar,
the foretold floods, droughts, and violence,
Humankind's refusal to mend their ways,
Has long been predicted.
In the face of this inevitability,
Does it really matter whether we reached this end through our own actions,
Or through the divine intervention of the Gods that we created?
When children can play outside no more,
The only game that is passed down from generation to generation,
Is the blame game.
You can lead a horse to the water,
But you can't make it drink
What isn't there anymore.
Zero.
Aarti Balaji is a fourth year student at Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune. She is an amateur in performance poetry, but has been writing for a long time.