Human Conditions

What some see as a plank, others see as a sliver.
What starts out as a rivulet can swell into a river.
But there is a dead center closer to what’s real—
a place optimists overlook and pessimists overfeel.

Some may have solutions that others find absurd
and as a result, simply let go unheard.
But as we spend time bickering o’er who is right or wrong,
more sinister plans of nature flow rapidly along.

There’s a reason we are labeled as the human “race.”
Most problems exist because we cannot slow our pace.
We speed too quickly forward, not considering the end
of all the natural balances that we choose to bend.

The food we grow is excess and we throw away
forty percent of it, every week and day
while people starve around us. We can’t find a solution
to world hunger, extinct species, global warming or pollution.

Each plastic bag we use is the beginning of a motion
that takes it down that rivulet to river to the ocean
where it will join the others—the flip flops and the dishes
that are killing off our coral and our mollusks and our fishes.

We choke our air and wonder why we cannot breath.
Our youths lack a direction. They question and they seethe.
What choices have we left them as we export all their jobs
and give them all devices that turn them into blobs?

If there were a grand plan for ridding Mother Earth
of every single species that had a use or worth,
I think it would be planned by man and not by evolution.
Increasingly we seem to be mounting a revolution

It’s as though we’re pre-conditioned, as though we have a need
first of all, to bring an end to every other breed,
and then to do ourselves in to restore the motion
of evolution once again. To see what is her notion

of what might work the next time in building a global order
that knows its place in things without straying ‘cross the border.
Perhaps billions of years from now, nature will proudly flout
another scheme for nature that this time will work out!

The prompt words today are dead, center, rivulet and globe. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/rdp-tuesday-dead/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/10/30/fowc-with-fandango-center/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/agnostic/(actually, rivulet)
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/10/27/daily-addictions-2018-week-43/globe