Over 100,000 people are drowned, pummeled to death, or swept away into the ocean.

Snorkelers exchange places with sun bathers, in a twist of fate,

Aquaphobes realize their worst nightmare,

Divers of the deep are saved from certain death,

As the tsunamis have their way with us, feeble humans.

Remember when all we had to worry about were quakes?

When we wandered the land, herding animals, growing plants, praising a higher power?

That was all.  A simple life.  Nature was the queen bitch.  We were her playthings.

People aren’t expecting this.  They’re reading headlines of their papers. 

“We do the killing around here!”  The headlines shout. 

“To hell with the drowned folks in the Third World, who still worship the Bitch.  We can kill more than She can!”

No, we can’t.  Ours is a perfected smart bomb, a roadside outburst, a kid strapped with Hamas explosives, a shaheed, a martyr, and his family is graced with plastic grapevines above their wall, and new appliances in their frail abode. 

This isn’t Nature’s exchange rate.  We never blame the wave for taking our loved one.  We simply look out at the vast lines of bloated bodies, floating in the surf, and sigh, a deep, soul-wrenching and ancient sigh. 

Adonai! 

The father of the suicide shaheed is standing next to his new refrigerator, paid for with blood money, and his eyes are vacant, and he no longer goes to work. 

His is the last refuge of our political earthquake, where innocents die because of premeditated revenge and murder.  They are not taken back to a watery grave of the Mother.  Their souls are condemned to repeat the act of explosion, implosion, political schizophrenia, forever and ever, amen.  And we are left with our Environmental Protection Agency and our quakes to shake some sense into us after Christmas.