Fela Kuti’s ‘Water No Get Enemy’ is one of my favorite songs about life, and it’s echoing in my head as I think about Reckoning 7. The Afrobeat maestro warns humans not to war with water, because we cook and wash with it, we drink it, and clean both the newborn and the dead with it. In other words, water is life; only those who want to die trouble it, and that’s exactly what we’re doing now. We seem to forget that Earth is two thirds aquatic ecosystems that stabilize the global climate and sustain life. We increasingly unsettle water bodies with our spills, plastics, and the additional stressor of warmer temperatures that drive extreme events like floods, droughts, and wildfires.
Human activities invade species, shrinking biodiversity and engendering extinction. So, let’s sing about crests, let’s sing about atolls, let’s sing about seaward slopes. What’s beauty if not Rainbow Reef, Grand Central Station Chimneys, Great Barrier Reef, and Andaman Sea Reef? What else is beauty? But don’t worry if your work isn’t about oceans, aquifers and springs, rivers and streams, wetlands, bays, and estuaries. Water has no enemy; it’s life, and if you’ve written a poem about environmental justice please send it my way.
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I have read some of your works and dare say they’re rare at times like these when poetry is watered down to unacceptable standards. But I love poems that make me think deep beyond my pedestrian lanes and helps me float away to realms almost otherworldly.
Here again I share your thoughts about water and think that man has done injustice to it albeit ignorantly. By personal experience I have learned and now persuaded that water is life as mush as air is. Fela was right about it: water has no enemies. Its a shame that ninety percent of earth’s population are not conscious of this fact and perhaps human greed is a huge factor.