I am the World

I am the endless expanse of blue that yawns out above and the sparkling, seamless carpet of aquamarine that threads out below. I am the golden grains of the Sahara and the snowballed peaks of the Alps. I am the degenerate slums of India and the mystique grandeur that pervades its Taj Mahal. I am the oppressively dark, ominously silent jungles of the Amazon and the clay baked earth of Africa. I am the stage of the greatest plays ever to be enacted: embittered world wars; blood curdling genocides; God’s wrath, unrestrained and terrible in Nature; the incalculable collapse of international economies. I am the chasm of the Grand canyon and the ostentatious catwalks of Milan. I am the parched footprints of Australia and the labyrinthine waterways of Venice. I belong to no one, yet my skin is soiled with the blood of a hundred nations. I am, the World.

I am the World, and it isn’t Time that has ravaged me, but Greed. Greed of a People who talk all the time, yet don’t actually say anything; People who have forgotten their thirst for innocent dreams of selfless lives and noble loves that encompass the gift of breath; a People who continue subtracting, but never add; of big words, but small character; of an era in my antique history where there are thieves and then THIEVES – who importune Human Rights, yet continue to consciously rape the very source of their sustenance in insatiable avarice; of a People whose lack of principle would have made Iago tremble and Machiavelli shudder.

I am the World, and in my aeons I have retrogressed two fold with each progression; Men have walked the Moon, yet there are parts of me still un-chartered; the air has been cleaned up, yet my soul has become polluted; the atom has been conquered, yet prejudice still weighs me down; there are more degrees, but less common sense; a wealth of experts, yet more problems.

I am the World – the World of throwaway diapers, disposable morality, one-night stands and overweight children, and drugs that do everything from induce euphoria to soothe to destroy. The World where the colossal ego of Men serve as the fuel to wage wars that raze whole civilisations to near extinction – and like bushfire in the African Savannah, the force of Man’s inexhaustible Greed has scorched my being, leaving me but a derelict fragment of what I’d been in Youth.

I am the World, and in my ancient years I have learnt an important truth: a bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer…it sings because it has a song. Man seeks answers where there are none, and in his quest to interpret a song with no purport he has looted everything from me, leaving me in desolate obscurity – a mere shadow of immutable glory. He has multiplied his possessions, but reduced his values. He spends too much, drinks too much, gets too angry, wants too much, and prays too seldom – and as a consequence he forgets that things are only as valuable as people make them. The debauched politics of Man is so engrossed in proving who’s right and who’s wrong, that they have forgotten what’s right and what’s wrong.

I am the World, I have been viewed from the outer limits and Men have proclaimed me as a most momentous sight, a vista the likes of which they have never witnessed – yet it is ironic that everyday a little bit of me is murdered. It is said, that irony is insult with a smiling face. I have for millennia provided for all and demanded nothing in return – what have I done to deserve this malignant sneer? My only purpose is to BE, and my lonely fate is to turn Time on my axis, setting myself, as those who are unhappy often do, a kind of pastoral litany. My pillaged soul has become another slovenly vessel stranded in the Bermuda Triangle of the Universe

Ever since the conception of Man’s cognition, my origins have been contested and argued invariably, however, the most popular scientific theory is the hypothesis of the primeval atom. My birth may still be debatable and though the future is as murky as the swamps of Venezuela…I am the World and as a result of Man’s ignoble rapacity, this is the way I will end: not in an explosion of splendorous effulgence, not with a bang – but with a whimper.