She drifts into cities on fertile winds,
probes cracks with pollen and spores.
She settles into soft places.
Sterility offends
so she seeps through seals,
penetrates pipes and wires.
She bathes in neon green lagoons.
In the sludge of industrial waste ponds
she knits new enzymes.
She sleeps in seed-banks
beneath the streets of Rio
and ring-roads of Beijing.
She breathes the smog of Karachi,
the dust of Dhaka and Delhi.
She filters the grit of Mexico City.
She creeps into slums of São Paulo,
Kolkata, Jakarta, Lagos, Lahore.
She sinks deep roots.
She savors Manhattan shadows
where pavement ants eat pizza crumbs
and coyotes scavenge epicurean rats.
On the ragged margins of Midwestern farms
and pockets of the once-Great Plains,
in exhausted Southern cotton fields
and ashes of ancient rain forests
torched for soy and palm
she waits.
As she watches the modern world go down
beneath the weight of eight billion souls
she sings to the heart of humanity –
Heal, for time is a balm
and as long as Sun and Earth endure,
in the broken ages, Gaia abides.
