Perhaps

Perhaps it’s only evolution, these changes

our world, this earth, is going through, the warming

seas and melting ice flows, snow where

there was none and storms more fierce, more

destructive, floods and famine and fires; perhaps,

like many things, things must be destroyed to flourish,

the dross burned away and loss giving way to new,

as the earth has done for years, for centuries

and millennia, since God’s creation began

or microbes spawned and crawled out of the ooze

onto land, those floods and Noah’s ark, the plagues

of locust, even the ash darkening the skies

and the dinosaurs reduced to bones and reconstructions

on display, the elements of fantasy, legend, and lore;

perhaps in some big scheme, some cosmic plan, changes

ultimately make life better, advancing nature’s dominion

and continuance, but a plan with its own timetable,

a distant start and indeterminate end, moving on nature’s schedule,

the natural order of things progressing -- perhaps.

 

But enter now humanity, humankind seeking dominance and control,

fearing nothing and overcoming all but himself, his arrogance

and blindness out of time, out of place; yet inpatient for change,

eager for what comes next, that great unknown to raise him up,

make him greater, and the present in the way, he hastens it along,

believing his own self-importance and building a highway to the heavens

even as earlier man built his own tower rising upward to be struck down

by a greater power beyond himself and replaced with chaos

and confusion, dividing mankind and setting us back, a reminder

of man’s limitations and interference -- perhaps.