Once a Mountain

I was a bride dressed in fine green

With air, water and soil clean

The moving clouds above me would greet me everyday with a warm ‘hello’.

As the rains that poured from it, I would with great delight swallow.

The butterflies, birds, bees and the beast

And with the sun rising to my east

While the city to my south did lie

As it stealthily crawled and sprawled towards me, for me to die.

Men blasted, quarried and plundered me of my natural wear

 My rocky bones they all did lay bare

O, the waters of my soul has ebbed

As settlements, factories and industries lie scattered disheveled in a concrete web.

I was once a mountain

The tribes life of simplicity in a fountain

What was once a trail in my body

In now criss-crossed by metalled roads which looks shoddy.

Where are the springs, streams, brooks and water-falls?

Did you hear my final desperate call?

The wind laments as it wails over my empty breast

While the people silently look over me dying in Nature’s nest.