'Microbes', a poem by Dwayne B. Sapling, Oracle, USA
They were the first, and, for many billions of years, they were the only life on Earth. Their living created and continues to maintain the atmosphere we breathe.
They are the foundation of the Earth’s recycling system; without them we would be buried in waste. They live in our intestines providing us with nutrients and vitamins we would not otherwise have.
Yet, after all they do for us, how do we express our gratitude? - With irrational fear and loathing. We engage in a futile war with them - a war that, should we win, would end with our own deaths.
More and more of our cleaning products taught their “antiseptic” qualities. What does it really cost to be temporarily 99% germ free?
In our efforts to “purify” our public water systems of the “enemy”, we have poisoned the water to the point that it is no longer fit to drink anyway!
Am I saying that we should not protect ourselves from the few species (among the millions of species of microbes) that harm us? - No
What I am asking is that we think about what we are doing. Is it “sapient” to indiscriminately destroy the many who help us, and whom we need, to get the few that harm us?
Give this a thought: Physically, what are we? - We are trillions of individual microbes forming a symbiotic community we call “our body”!
Comments to the author are welcomed.
Published in the August 2009 edition of Micscape.
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