By Nicola Ranson
PROMPT — No one noticed ...
The emails want answering
The bills want paying
The garden wants watering
The calls want returning
The gifts want thanking
The clothes want washing
The husband wants feeding
The friends want nurturing
The world?
Wants Nothing.
This blessed neutrality
Provides the stuff of life:
The elements, the food,
And the stuff of death:
The fires, the plagues
But still, this mother of all species
Lets me be.
It’s entirely my choice
Whether to stomp out a cigarette on
Roundup laden grass.
Or, with sufficient silence,
To listen.
Then I might
Hear her crying
Tears of melted glaciers
For the loss of birdsong, and butterfly wings
As species disappear, and languages die:
A catastrophe so large
My Everything could never be enough
To meet the want.
But if the world wanted one thing
It would be that I care
For the earth, her elements, her peoples.
But it’s not about the world wanting
But what I want for her, for me, for us
It is our world after all.
Were we so busy with our emails
No one noticed?
Nicola Ranson is a writer and social worker living in Encinitas, California with her filmmaker husband Ron, with whom she recently co-wrote the screenplay for “Tattooed Trucks of Nepal—Horn Please.” Her work has been published in The Mighty, The Feisty Writer, Stage Directions, Advanced Computer Entertainment, and Somatic Psychotherapy Today. Excerpts of her upcoming memoir have twice been selected for publication in the literary anthology, Shaking the Tree.