Tender Humanity

This piece was inspired by Anne Rice and is a tribute to the victims of the Tsunami and the New Orleans disaster.

Falling in love with humanity was no way to live. It was a wrenching pain that wouldn’t subside but grew with every sip, every taste. The unsatiable thirst that quenched the body but burned the soul with secrets not owned but borrowed for the love of blood.

A moonlit night on Bourbon Street would never be the same. The Saxophone would play a soulful elegy for those dead and gone. It would play for those who were left behind, the neglected who were loved less by the mortals but more so by the gods that wished their lives be cut short by the raging forces of nature.

It could be New Orleans or a forgotten island somewhere thousands of miles apart; what difference did it make? The drowned helpless cries of thousands that wailed under the deluge set forth by Titan himself were the same.

A mother holding the limp body of a drowned child or a father walking with eyes as dead as the family he had just laid rest to. The drama was too painful to watch. The misery, the untold horrors, were too much to bear. Centuries may have passed faster than the blink of an eyelid, yet the pain of recurring devastations impaled his heart harder than the one before.

Nature treated the white, black and browns the same. The blood in their veins was his to love and yet he died a bit each time he saw them die a death caused by poverty and not sickness.

How could mortals love their own so little whereas he, their killer, loved them more than the blood he craved?

New Orleans, his beautiful woman, was no longer the same. She had been ravaged for far too long, left to rot in the stench of stupidity and indifference. And now, they wanted to resurrect her as if no wrong had been done to her.

Article Author: Deepti Lamba

Deepti Lamba is an aspiring writer and an editor for Desicritics. She can be found at Things That Bang and at Suspended Moments

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