Squander - Sept 30 2026

 

Squander

Sept 30 2026

Rain, after a dry spell

soaks into the ground

the way a parched man guzzles

whatever foul liquid

you offer him.

It may have poured

come down in torrents

rained cats and dogs,

but there’s no puddling, no mud,

not even a dark blush

to the desiccated soil.

The earth seems bottomless,

its thirst unquenchable.

It percolates down,

finding its way through cracks and seams

and into streams,

then collecting underground 

in great aquifers

where for millennia

it may sit in the dark;

cold still water

with an iron tinge

and the hard taste of rock.

This is like the rich man’s horde

his cache of wealth.

Precious water he can tap

like liquid gold

beneath the desert sand.

Or, like a spendthrift, squander,

pumping it out

until the ground subsides

and his palace crumbles,

the lush green crops

turn into husks

baked brown by the sun.

     ~~~~

  . . . Or a dry spell

when no rain comes.

Cloudless skies,

and parched men 

down on their knees

gazing listlessly up.

Praying to their god

because what else is there to do?

Words, from dry cracked lips

an indifferent god 

has yet to hear.

It rained yesterday, and the turbid puddles on the gravel road were wider than they’ve been since the spring thaw.  I thought back to a dry summer, when a few hours after it rains (even an infrequent heavy rain) there was no sign it even had. The soil just drank it up.

Behind this poem was a critique of short-term thinking: how susceptible we are to immediate gratification; living for today and the hell with tomorrow. As in mining aquifers:  consuming groundwater faster than it can be replenished.  More particularly, though, was the idea of accelerating climate change and our collective heedlessness. When it will be too late for anything but prayer.   . . . Yes, couldn’t once again resist throwing in a barb at religion!

(I was originally tempted to write contempt for religion, but that’s not really how I feel. Maybe contempt for the lack of intellectual rigour in faith-based belief, but not for the understandable need religion fills for people — consolation, community, ritual, and meaning — or contempt toward them. After all, life can be hard. It’s just that for me, I’m more willing to feel bad than believe in stuff someone just made up. 

So believe to your heart’s content. But please don’t take it as license to kill the apostate, forcibly convert the heretic, or make war; to issue self-serving decrees in the name of some god; to ignore science; or to indoctrinate my children while making me join with you in prayer. Freedom from religion as well as freedom of it. 

And I don’t buy the argument that without theology we’d descend into immorality and hedonistic decadence. What about basic humanism? Because you don’t need dogma to live ethically, or fear of hellfire to be good. Goodness for its own sake works better and means more.)