earthquakes
earthquakes are at once terrifying and beautiful; they speak of the fragility of even mother nature but they are so great, so powerful, so grandiose. we shiver at the idea of earthquakes, the beauty of soft soil crumbling into an even deeper abyss we are too afraid to venture into.
her fingers, brown and warm and welcoming, at once become claws, angry at us (for what reason? what have we done wrong?) and she swallows us, scratching from the inside outwards, raking in bodies and edifices and things in which we take pride. she swallows our pride. she eats our pride.
but in doing so she also swallows some of herself, letting trees and beautiful animals fall into the unidentified hellscape that is below, where perhaps fragments of buildings, leftover limbs, and misshapen animal carcasses all gather to have a tea party mourning for those above.
her children, the beauty which she has birthed (though prematurely--they are still attached to her) are taken back into her insides, where they will lay for the rest of eternity. why so? perhaps she is embarrassed of the creation she has made, and it is her way of bubbling up her anger and taking back some of the terrors she has caused, though inadvertently. she did not wish for this in the beginning. everything begins with a benign cause; catastrophe is never intended - it is only an effect of the element of existence. we cannot help but be impure and a curse to mother nature.