SHE IS……….. by Dr Adoma Odame

We plan and save for months
To travel across Europe on a vacation
She coughs and Eyjafjallajökull explodes
Spewing ash over Europe and we watch helplessly in the airport
As flights are cancelled across nations

You plan on attending a conference in Turkey
She sneezes and a catastrophic earthquake shakes the country burying thousands
Children are rendered fatherless
Mothers are rendered homeless
And your conference is postponed indefinitely

They plan on touring Indonesia and all its cute islands
But then she laughs
And deep in the heart of the ocean
The earth quakes and a tsunami arises
It wipes out the very island they planned visiting

We build powerful cars and aeroplanes
Skyscrapers of steel and glass
She blows and a hurricane appears
Snapping the skyscraper as though it were a broomstick
A tornado lifts the cars as if they were toys.
She is……. powerful

We pierce holes in her protective ozone layer
And she heats up so fast and fierce
Heat strokes cause our children and elderly to faint
She fans wild fires across countries
Destroying everything in their wake

The global warming causes flooding
And we watch with our hearts melting in fear
As glaciers melt
As the sea level rises
As towns and villages disappear
History and livelihoods vanish together

We cause a nuclear reactor to explode in Chernobyl
And the fall out is felt in Finland ,Sweden and Belarus
Radioactive clouds, radioactive rain, radioactive grass
We in Ghana are told not to drink imported milk
Because the cows in other countries may have eaten radioactive grass

We set off an atomic bomb in Hiroshima
Till date the Hibakusha suffer
The land is still uninhabitable
We pour mercury into Minamata bay
The adults suffer ataxia and paralysis
The children are born with small heads and damaged brains

She doesn’t forgive our errors
She will right the wrong done her,
But she will take a few millenia to do so
And we will suffer
We always do

We act as though ‘we inherited her from our parents but no, we borrow her from our children’
Therefore we need to protect her and preserve her
We need to ensure a perfect balance is maintained for her
We don’t want ‘ A silent spring’
Or a generation unborn to suffer from our actions or inactions
Do what you can to protect her

She is powerful, she is strong, she is relentless but we are her custodians

Fire, Wind, Water…… She is Earth