Human folly - the fragile earth, my glass bottle

 

Forlorn, feeling empty and finding it hard to focus,

Along the banks of a lost river, that I remember, used to be.

Tired, and teary, and in an urgent need for some water, 

I came upon a bottle of some kind,

transparent like glass 

but made of some unbreakable substance

and no opening that I could see at a glance

neither a cork nor a twist top, what kind of bottle it was?

A bottle with no mouth, but somehow it spoke to me!

Foggy inside, with a piece of paper with some strange letters and unknown symbols written in different colours on it, floating in it,

I shook it and the letters started to melt in the fog

their rainbow colours dissolving and resolving themselves, and a sound started to emanate from it

Ouummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Which started to turn into a song in a language I didn’t understand

But the music swayed me, and I shut my eyes, dancing to the tune, forgetting everything else,

Karagre Vasate Lakshmi, Karmadhye Saraswati, Karmule tu Govind, Prabhate Kar Darshanam.

I was calm after a long- long time, almost happy, and no more-thirsty, but thirsty for more,

when suddenly the bottle started to vibrate, and slipped out of my shaking hand

I opened my eyes, the bottle had gone, taking with it the colours, the rhythm, and the music!

I looked up, and saw that the bottle was just hanging there in the air, it seemed to have grown a bit in size

And was rounder too, like a glass ball and was rotating slowly on its axis,

Mesmerized, I looked on

The fog had cleared, and the colours floating around in it were reforming in dots of such bright colours, spectacular, sparkly, and pristine

the white dots condensing into balls of cotton, which started to melt, and it started to rain inside the bottle

the bluest possible colours appeared with dots of green and dark blue swimming in it, which were all increasing in size, turning into blue ponds, hills and trees that were lush and green

the brown and black dots appeared, turning into circles, and little figures of animals, birds, and butterflies could be seen going around the ponds, the hills and the trees

With awe and wonder and my mouth agape, I heard a sound of laughter as a group of people emerged in the most beautiful attires, made in rainbow colours, even brighter

holding hands and hugging each other, they started singing and dancing around the ponds, the hills, and the trees, going round and round

I started to hum with them, my feet starting to dance with their rhythm and sound

Never in my life had I been happier and lighter

I felt like flying, as my body soared up to hug the bottle

My glass bottle, it was marvellous, I thought!

I will keep it, I will cherish it, I will worship it! 

It was all mine, I smiled!

But the rotating bottle had started to go up higher and higher, getting away from me

“It was all yours, oh you poor fool!”  

I heard a sound right in my ear.

The bottle was getting smaller and smaller like a pale blue dot disappearing in the blue sky!

While the sound in my ear was getting louder and louder: 

“Wasn’t it beautiful?” 

“Didn’t it sustain you?” 

“Didn’t it heal you?” “

Didn’t it grant you life?”

“Wasn’t it enough?”

Oh! You, poor fool!”

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — …there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world (Carl Sagan, 1994). 

Sagan was inspired by the Voyager’s Photography in which the Earth was seen for the very first time from the outer reaches of the Solar System – Earth as a “pale blue dot” – a mote of dust suspended on a beam of sunlight!

(Reworked, A Martian's message - presented at SWF 2019, Might be from Mars)