Stolen fire wounded earth

Before the thick dusk from the dark water rises
we lit brightly the earth by a certain fire
said to have been stolen by a man named Prometheus.
Prometheus, it was said of him, as punishment, was fed to vultures when he was alive.
On our degenerating liver we now let the vultures feed, to keep the fire alive.
While the world shines bright, the glow in our souls gently fades.

There are inventions and uninventions in every cycle of progression and regression.
There are questions to be asked and answers to be found.
For all the answers that are sought there is earth, rare and rich.
At will and with no concern, we dig, and dig deep with arms
hewn out of iron and corrugated imagination.
We are surprised by what we find and we marvel at our reach. Truly,
if the earth were human, we are the worms feeding upon her flesh,
killing her slowly, killing ourselves consequently.
Earth perforated, earth scarred,
Earth too much wounded by civilization,
Who, among us, will heal her?

And I wonder

Once I came across a man. He seemed happy,
happy like a ghost visible in the broad daylight.
Without a care, he was walking, making his way
among the automobiles of one late afternoon.
And he walked as if he was walking on the water,
touching the ground barely.
One might say, of sorrows he seemed truly free.
Although, what you see is what you get, clearly,
there seems to be more than what meets the eye.
Life, I remember, is not containable,
not in a jar of one word.

Then they came, they came from such distances
for the pure joy of devising immortality and
designing unbroken lines of happiness. But
happiness as I know exists as geometry of fragments and
immortality, after certain age, loses its charms.
The old will leave the stage for the young,
because time does not reverse its course,
not under ordinary circumstances.

They keep coming from all directions and tribes
inventing privileged languages, symbols and signs:
Alpha and omega, cosmic constant, universal love,
ligase and kinase, centromeres and telomeres et cetera,
little realizing what telomeres are, the tail ends of
a chromosome, not really the center of life
in a world governed by forces besides fictions.

Outside the imaginable paradigms
a new life seems to be dawning.
And the life I once knew is already at stake.
I need to find my way back to Eden.
Someday, man will devise his own immortality,
but I wonder If he can save himself from all his ingenuity!