Are You Fit? Poem by Basanta Lohani

Nature seeks balance
In the golden mean
The fittest survive
And the weakest die
This ecology echoes
In the music of the wind
In the dripping of the rain
Flowing down the hills
The serpentine flow
Aggressively extends
Its regime
A boulder breaks in the cataclysm
The weak reduced to pebbles
The weaker to fine silvery dust
The weakest to the ocean
All along the bed
Sparkling with the sun's glow
Flowing like day and night
To meet its depths of rest
The migrating cloud
Begins a new journey
Telling her woes
With tears raining down
As she empties
Into the azure
Deepening with the youthful sun
Like the archway to heaven
Until the chirpings of birds
Fade pale with concern
For fledglings
The weakest of all
Lying in the nest

The sky changes into unlit night
For an owl to stir up
Amidst the silence
Swallowing the river's sound
Night trembles into pregnancy
To deliver a speckled dawn
Another new sibling
Thus she rears them all
Breathing life into destruction
There is no finale
Only a sequence of elimination
Where the weakest exit
Into a sequence of regeneration
And the fittest arrive

In this balance and coordination
The ocean's gain
Equals the land's loss
And the land's gain the ocean's loss
A whirling cycle
A cosmic equation

In this spectra
Of fine equilibrium
Your greed acts the rider
To tip the balance
To the unpredictable
The grandeur withers
Into mere sound and fury
Shattering the nest into fragments
Thus greed lords over love

Now tell me
In your domain
Are you fit?