“Haiku 4”

Mother Nature sees
the mindless way humans kill
her precious children.

— Safrianna Lughna

There’s a particular weight to this haiku—one I’ve been sitting with throughout the month.

Mother nature sees the mindless ways humans kill her precious children.

These words emerged from a place of deep sorrow, a grief that isn’t merely mine, but planet-wide.

When I watch the natural world, I see cycles that make sense.

Predator and prey, decay and renewal, and even the elegant brutality of a food chain that sustains itself.

A lion doesn’t kill from cruelty.

A wolf doesn’t hunt from hatred.

There’s an order to it all—sometimes harsh, but honest.

Nature being nature.

And then there are humans.

We kill each other—not for survival, but from fear.

From scarcity mindsets when abundance exists.

From shame that curdles into rage, blame that hardens into violence, and scapegoating that gives us permission to look away from our own shadows. We are the only species that murders our own kind while having a choice not to.

This haiku holds that contradiction: the tenderness of “precious children” alongside the violence of “mindless ways.”

We are one of her precious children—seemingly the most mindless of them all, too.

Mother Nature watches, and I imagine her heartbreak mirrors my own.

How do we become good stewards of this planet we inhabit? How do we stop being mindless murder-machines?

I don’t have clean answers. But I believe poetry helps us sit with these hard questions.

We can do better. We must.

Love,
Safrianna the Poet