Ashes to Awakening

Year 2024— a montage of grief and gladness.
Under the burden of its violent pulse,

humanity bowed, bloodied and broken,

beneath the endless rain of brutality,

across Ukraine, Palestine, and many places around.

The earth swelled with sorrow—

groaning under jackboots of hatred,

and charred whispers of dreams wiped out.

The planet cried out—melting ice, drowning shores,
forests consumed in apocalyptic flames.
We fed the beast of climate despair
with every careless flick of a match.
We didn’t listen to

warnings whispered by water and wind.

Politics raged,

borders shifted like restless ghosts.
Leaders rose, some with bombs,

others with bogus olive branches.

Truth shattered into spectacle of agendas,
empathy became a relic,

exchanged only when convenient.

Buzz of AI grew louder and faster.

We made machines to mimic us,

and, in the process, lost essence of our souls.

Our civilization slipped through

chinks of our glossy hi-end gadgets.

Pixel by pixel, byte by byte,

we swapped sincerity for screens,
forgetting value of shared silence.

And yet…and yet…

A baby’s first cry in a bombed-out hospital,
echoed through rubble-strewn streets.
Poets still wrote.

Musicians played.

Dreamers dreamed.

And healers healed,

even when wounds seemed deep.

All in sync to sow
wildflowers in wastelands!

A  year of no endings but a year of reckoning—

2024 holds a mirror up to our faces,

compelling us to see

the fragility and fickleness

of the world we had built.

A year where humanity stood baffled,
asking not what we had lost
but what we were still willing to save?

What will we say to the future?
That we burned?
Or that, in the ash,

we found the nerve to erase and re-rise?

Or would we crumble,

undone by our own absurdity and futility?

Only Time Will Tell !