This picture is taken from my upstairs terrace. The dome you see covers the ceiling of my bedroom.

All of these photos are either taken from my house or from an area within one block of it. These are photos of just one fire and one flood/avalanche that have decimated the area where I live, and they are nothing, I’m sure, compared to the California fires and the cyclones  and tidal waves elsewhere on earth.

A Letter from Mother Earth

All the riches you have stolen may be won in vain.
As you exploit my waterways and open every vein,
surely you can hear me crying out in pain?

When it comes to my riches, each madman wants a piece
at the cost of reason, willing to break the peace.
Will there be no ending? Will the warlords never cease?

As you grow one more spare tire around your spreading waist,
the spoils build up around you: the garbage and the waste.
How much plastic carnage will serve to suit your  taste?

As you fill me full of chemicals, I become more weak.
Yet still you spray and pillage, hour by day by week.
The death of soil that nourishes can’t be what you seek!

Fluorocarbons, Roundup, radiation, lead––
all the earth’s blind children just follow where they’re led.
Swallowing all the poisons, devouring what they’re fed.

All the bleating sheep, the entire driven herd
do their best to overlook all the things they’ve heard—
every threat of doomsday, every warning word.

The cyclones swirl above you. The fires burn me bare.
How many floods and blizzards will your children bear?
Why don’t you heed the warnings? Don’t you even care?

When it comes to what you’re leaving to your son and heir,
there may be no more water and there may be no more air.
Does this ever bother you? Do you even care?

If every son and daughter voiced their pleas aloud
and questioned all these foolish sins their fathers have allowed,
would they bend their heads in grief? Can they be shamed and cowed?

If they beg and bargain, if they plead and pray,
will parents listen to the ones who’ve been their prey,
or will they keep on throwing their children’s lives away?

Here is the NaPoWriMo prompt: Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that incorporates homophones, homographs, and homonyms, or otherwise makes productive use of English’s ridiculously complex spelling rules and opportunities for mis-hearings and mis-readings.