The Grass by Novid Shaid

“All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass”. W B Yeats

A lush and fertile patch of grass shivered in the breeze, sighing blissfully. Fully exposed to the benevolent sun and enriched by the timely monsoons, the grass grew to a staggering height, accommodating countless creatures great and small. Nothing, so it seemed, could curtail its life-force; nothing could obstruct the sun or the rain replenishing it. The grass was suffused with a rich and deep shade of green, so much so that just to look upon it brought relief to hearts, just to hear its whispers in the wind brought tranquility to troubled minds.

But times changed; people changed; natures evolved; subtle ideas began to fester. A snake from beyond settled in the grass, twisting its coil between the blades and whispering subtle suggestions to the very roots of the green sea. Time elapsed; the snake slithered away, but its ideas had taken root; the grass was spellbound. Now the blessings of the sun and the rain were mistaken for rights; fortune was misinterpreted as certainty. Although the sun continued to beam its rays upon everything and the rain still tumbled down, the grass had grown thick in its own delusions of grandeur and its right to the blessings from above. Without it realising, the roots below turned a sickly yellow and each blade of grass began to smell rank and rotten to the core. Suddenly, humans arrived, with their hulky, moving machinery, dumping all their garbage and rubble from their developments, covering the grass with a dense layer of suffocating trash. A vast cloud of stifling dust rose after an immense vehicle unloaded mounds of dirt on the once green patch.

Now the grass felt this calamity spreading through its veins; each blade flattened by the grey flood. Its heart lamented as it lay deep beneath the rubble, divorced from the light above, cut off from the rain. Its blissful sighs had now turned into smothered cries for deliverance. It had not anticipated this catastrophe and now, flattened in the darkness, it confounded the snake it had listened to so enrapt, and it cried for the sun to reach it once again, for the rain to touch the tips of its blades.

So the sun still shone; the rains still fell; the earth still revolved. Desperate and humbled, the grass cried out from the darkness. Time healed. The sun’s rays slowly penetrated the ground, the rain drops crept through the earth.

Until one day, out of all the toxic mass and trash, something stood out proudly from the earth, like an outstretched index finger, like a spirit awakened, touched by the sun’s rays, refreshed by a lingering drop of dew: a blade of grass.

Novid Shaid, June 2015
www.novid.co.uk