Protozoa

You think of them grappling

Little monsters in a drop of water –

Whipping flagella, thrusting pseudopodia

In a slow dance of life and death –

Splitting, eating, consuming

Living, dying, without ever knowing

Of such things as air, or the sky

Or even that they are alive.

Monsters in a drop of water

Crawling on a grain of sand

Blindly thrusting, living, dying, ignorant, alone.

It's so easy to destroy them.
Pour in a drop of an acid and they're gone.

It’s easy to feel contempt, easy to feel

Superior, exalted, above it all –

Sitting here in this drop of air

Covering a little rock turning round a minor sun

Surrounded by billions of others,

Existing a moment, now here, now gone
In the wink of a cosmic eye.

It's easy to feel exalted over 

The monsters in the drop of water

Who eat to live, and struggle to survive.

While the exalted make war on each other

And poison the waters and the air

To make things like plasma screen TV,

And fashionable gloves.

It’s easy, to drop bombs and make speeches

About freedom and democracy. Easy 

To destroy in the name of progress

To wipe out in the name of need

And economic growth.

Maybe the monsters in the drop of water 

Might have things to say

About who the real monsters are.

 Copyright B Purkayastha 2012