We are living in a bubble that instead of expanding and including gets smaller and more compressed and prohibitive by the day.

Like a dying dandelion we have shed our blooming and become empty stalks, our offspring scattered out into a world with no fertile landing spaces.

Our leaders spout cruel gibberish and take everything away to keep for themselves.

Our spirits are becoming as gnarled as theirs, closed and unyielding, angry and afraid.

The earth and its waters, its winds and weathers, its fire and fury, are rising and refusing, roiling and roaring in the deafening silence of neglect and abuse.

If I squint I can still see a peaceful place of balance between the densely overgrown thorns, but I can’t find the path to the portal.

I ask for a large intervention, not for me, but for this planet and all of its creatures.

I do not exclude humanity, but I do not excuse them either.

So

This is our
world—starving children
generate
not sorrow
but defensiveness.  Fraud is
magnified, enhanced,

amplified
by technology–
circuitry
beloved,
not life.  We’ve forgotten how
to be human.  Help

us coax hope
from disaster, seeds
from ashes–
cherishing
connections uncorroded
by weapons or lies.

Inspired by Rashunda Tramble’s New Moon in Scorpio post (“The Scorpio new moon invites you to bring everything to the altar. Lay those troubles you’ve been carrying all year down. Then utter your cry. Pray, chant, do whatever it is you do to communicate with the Source. Do it with meaning, intensity, and in earnest.”); the November 19 PAD chapbook challenge to use the words bubble, dandelion, gibberish, gnarled, roiling and squint; Lisa’s dVerse quadrille prompt word of coax; Jennifer Wagner’s dVerse prompt of Ted Kooser’s “So This Is Nebraska”; and the Tanka Tuesday challenge from Willow to write shadorma prose.