Even though our planet,
our world, our home
is called “Earth”
when seen up-close, from space,
when the light from the sun
is shining upon it,
it can be perceived as looking
green or perhaps blue in colour;
however, at night,
if looked down upon from orbit,
you could be mistaken for thinking
that our planet were emanating
its own electricity –
especially when the veil of darkness
falls upon our planet
and the human population
decides to turn on their lights.
In actuality, our world is an ocean world
that once had one single, massive,
super-continent called “Pangaea”
that was the only island of Earth
to be found, surrounded on all sides
by thousands of miles of water…
and then, a long time ago,
for reasons as yet unknown,
Pangaea broke apart and began
to slowly transform into the shapes
that we see when we look at the geography
of our planet in an atlas, on a map,
or by looking at the world
as it is presented on a man-made globe.
Our planet is a sphere –
no matter what people who believe
that the Earth is flat will tell you –
and we know it is because
when it is seen from space
the edge of its surface curves
like a ball or like a glass marble.
Our world has not always been how it is now,
and some people often take the gift
of our world for granted –
especially the way that the majority
of its environment seems perfectly suited
to our needs – and that can be witnessed
every day, even in a picturesque place
that might be someone’s exact example
of somewhere that resembles
what a person imagines as their version
of paradise, when the evidence
of humanity’s often selfish nature
can be seen in the form of the litter
and the dis-guarded things
that have found their way into
our world’s seas which float
on the surface of the ocean’s skin
like the sores of some kind
of man-made disease.
Humanity needs to protect our planet
from itself so that the small minority
who do not think or care
about the repercussions of their actions,
nor the potential future that this current
generation and the previous generation,
are leaving for the next generation
to find a way to clean up
the mess left for them.
Our planet’s oceans are precious ecosystems,
environments, and homes for some
of our planet’s most diverse and beautiful
life-forms – not to mention that every human
alive is a descendant of the first mammals
that crawled out of the ancient sea
millions of years ago –
and everything alive has a right
to live somewhere untouched and unharmed
by a fellow species of this planet.
No one owns this world…
no one can predict what effect
our polluting of our planet’s air,
oceans, and land will ultimately have
on everything that makes this world
the planet that it is supposed to be –
but one thing is for sure,
no matter what we do
from here on out
to begin to clean up
humanity’s own mess
any way that we can,
there is no way that anybody
could ever entirely turn back
Earth’s environmental clock.
Happy Earth Day, everybody! 🌍
markthepoet.me 