Listen to poem:
Down to the Last Drop
One
laugh.
Then
another.
Then it won't
stop— giggling
and tickling.
Tears streaming,
sides aching. The
good kind of drops,
the helpless kind— The
kind that makes your face
hurt. And you don't even
care. Not grief! Not one bit of
it! Just joy overflowing its banks.
spilling down cheeks like a tap
leaking, when someone forgot to turn off
properly— drip... drip... drip... all
through the night, maddening, wasteful: the
sound that keeps a whole house awake. Cursed by
everyone who ever lay there counting those
endless, incessant drips. But turn the same drop
loose in a drought, and it's a miracle instead of a
nuisance— A spring, patient and unhurried, filling a
tin bucket one speck at a time, watched by a farmer who
has learnt that hurry never once made water fall faster.
Ask the man crawling towards an oasis, throat like
sandpaper, mind full of mirages, what a single drop is
worth to him and he will tell you: Everything! Every
last mouthful; every drop counts! They say, and
they're right— Whether it's rationed in a canteen.
Begged from a cracked and stubborn cloud. Shaken
loose, unbidden, unstoppable by something so
funny you can hardly breathe. Strange how
the same small bead of water can be
hoarded, hated, prayed for, wasted— and
here, right now, streaming down a
laughing face, simply, purely
wasted on happiness and worth
every drop.
Not
Earth.
Never Dirt
Say it
plainly— This
is Planet
Water, the only
sphere for
light-years
wearing a blue
ocean like a coat.
Seventy per cent
liquid water, thirty
percent afterthought. Every
other planet out there is
only stone, dust, and dryness;
Everything is water - it's the hub
of life, It's mother and medium, and
azure milieu, Holding secrets no
formula quite explains. Two parts
hydrogen, one part oxygen and so much else
besides— Call it Life, Alive, if you need a
word for it, because nothing breathes, nothing
grows; Nothing is sustained without it. And
still we treat this miracle like plumbing— taps
left running, rivers rerouted Aquifers drained
faster than rain could answer. As if more would
simply arrive from somewhere, as if the planet kept a
second coming reservoir hidden away somewhere, banked
for a rainy day. But it doesn't! Never Did! Can't
Happen! All the water that will ever exist already
exists, cycling, recycling in the water cycle. The
same molecules that filled the ancient seas now fill
our kettles, bathtubs, and tears. We only borrow it,
use it, waste it briefly before it moves
on draining away, indifferent to how carelessly we
let it go. An old truth still holds— A well
teaches its worth when it runs dry, and by then
the lesson costs everything. So before the
taps run to nothing, before the wells are
empty and the dips fall silent. Remember
what this world is actually named: not
Earth! But Planet Water. Precious,
patient, finite Water, We are only
guests here, drinking from
something we did not make
and cannot replace.
H 2 O Water!
.
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