A rabid lotus bloomed in the wheat field one afternoon.
Saffron was its shade, not pink.
The farmer who bent her back all day
Stood up for the first time to think. She knew;
This shade was the sun that would never set,
The days that would never end,
Keeping her fellowship at march
Towards a night that would bring rest
To their sufferings and uprest.
She tried to pull it out.
But unlike a weed, its roots were buried deep,
Held tight underground by a company of rats who believed they were cows,
Who believed they were holding the flower in place for a greater cause.
Who forgot that soon, standing in the same place, they would die and rot,
Only for new rats to replace them while the roots spread wide still.
The crops may die if the lotus doesn't die.
The farmers may die if the lotus doesn't die.
So she called the entire sisterhood and brotherhood.
The cows—the real cows—tugged at it with a rope.
The farmers ploughed at it with their tools in hope that it could be uprooted.
But the rats crawled out to infest the crops,
And to bite the hands that fed the nation.
When their plates grew empty and their stomachs grew hungry,
The nation walked out to the field.
Seeing the rouse, they walked back into the house,
And typed some phrases with their brains sealed.
"Rats and flowers can do no harm.
Stop fighting and go farm," the nation said.
Little did they know that the roots had already spread.
Rats lurked beneath them, chipping away the foundations, causing trouble.
Soon the nation would fall, and they'd all be under the rubble.