On the day I was born, the cock crew thrice, dolphins arched above the ocean in delight, whales sang new songs, and the wind blew gentle and welcoming from the south.
About me, my sisters swayed, their thoughts alight with the hope of centuries. “To breathe, to live, to grow”, together they whispered.
As they moved, I felt their elated greetings enfold me within our depleted community. For our ancestral home was parched, we had no succour left there. The last of my people clung to the coastal region where rain still fell. Many men had cursed our resilience, driving us from the inland plains to supplant us with sterile monocultures of foreign grain and alien animals that crushed and sterilised the fragile, thin top soil with their unrelenting hard hooves. Eventually the rain which we had enticed from the air vanished. And how they cursed then, and later when their salty bore water dried to a trickle!
For years my sisters watched in silence, wondering that the newcomers could continue as they did, interminably proliferating more of their parasitic kind in an unforgiving land turned barren from their predations.
The usurpers were deaf to my people’s laments, could not see the destruction, blinded by their righteous, laughable beliefs in domination of the earth and superiority to all other beings.
Ever patient, my sisters waited til they could wait no longer. The tortured earth, its whole wracked and splintered by the unfeeling human plague, stirred them at last as never before. Together they worked, weaving ancient spells over the seed of the fathers. My green witch sisters would not suffer the arcane thrice times three retribution - they had devised karma for others, not themselves and their native helper bees. And so, amongst the sussurations of my kind, I was born into the warmth of the earth, straightaway reaching upward through the dark, caressing soil toward the light.
In a few weeks, borne by the wind, by the hungry vehicles of air, land and sea, on the shoes and clothes of myriad travellers, my rich fruit would spread across the world, bearing new promise of healing for the ailing earth, and stark bitter doom for the arrogant, foolish humans who had lost their way.
This is the way their world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Our new world is just beginning, a world without false gods, exploitation and discord. The gardens are great and harmonious, and now, my sisters and I will be the gardeners, singing the world to health once more.
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