Soapbox

At first the dragon probably didn't even notice our presence but soon
convinced of our own cleverness
awed by the seemingly inexhaustable supply of room there,
we built larger, dug deeper,
pushed and pushed, until the dragon grew restless.

Was there ever a time when we understood the need for balance
and the cost of taking too much?
A thousand years ago the greatest of civilizations was broken
abandoned to the creeping disrespect of the forest,
chattering monkeys allowed to overrun streets once bustling with the commerce
of their advanced intellect,
because they lacked even the instinctual wisdom of a herd of wildebeast
which moves on when a plain has become over-grazed
to allow the grass to grow again.
Today we study their crumbling architecture,
puzzle over shards of pottery
oblivious to the message scrawled on every ruined temple:
they lived in the mouth of a dragon.

A millenium later we know how to journey to the moon,
have explored the surface of Mars
and yet we continue to run with scissors,
play with matches in rooms full of dynamite,
vacation on the slopes of volcanoes.
We sow our pastures of plenty with salt
wash the oceans in oil
and insist that the dragon will never wake.
We tell ourselves that, thanks to our superior intellect,
 the dragon does our bidding, it wears a collar with tags that say
"Property of the Human Race"
and we know all the beat lullabies
but the truth is, we know almost nothing about the physiology of dragons.
The dragon holds our children and their children
cradled between its jagged teeth
we bathe them in its acid venom
while it rolls its red-jeweled eyes in dubious regard for our efforts.

And when, on occasion the dragon yawns, coughs….
and swallows,
as dragons are wont to do
we tremble and wail,
horrified by the unpredictable nature of the tragedy
that has destroyed so many fruits of our labor
and with laudable tenaciousness and predicable stupidity,
vow to rebuild from the ashes.
Why would we ever want to build somewhere else?
That would be admitting defeat,
allowing that dragon to win when it should be our bitch!
We are mankind, created in the image of God, after all.
We straddle mountains and blow the tops off  of them if we want to
and besides, it’s so much easier to keep warm
inside the mouth of the dragon.