As the car sped on
the navigation device 
kept up a steady patter.

One and a half kilometres
straight ahead, take the first turn left,
straight on for the next two kilometres,

follow the left incline,
continue for twenty metres,
turn right, go straight for fifty metres…

That's pretty much
what I did in life,
I couldn't help reflecting, 

and where am I now?
Negotiating a highway 
which connects everything 

but leads nowhere. 
That voice, super-sentient
in its satellite omniscience, 

intones interminably, like a pundit
reciting mantras, raspy 
in its breathless emphases, 

issuing directions, for whatever 
it is worth, as I meander forth
in an ever expanding desert,

lost irretrievably without a compass,
with no idea of my coordinates,
outside all maps.
                        

last line taken from Milan Kundera's novel 
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

Increasingly, it's about the weather, 

or, at least, should be, 
the state of nature,
not remaining merely a filler 
on the conversational platter,
a tidbit of a topic 
to fill those awkward gaps
between the prime items
on the menu:
it's unseasonably warm today,
or, rain is on the cards
or, perhaps, the Met office predicts
a low pressure formation
over the bay, if you please, 

but with the things that truly matter.

The vision, for instance, of the earth 
as a dry, flat, empty plate,
scrubbed clean of green,
hungry hemispheres drooping 
ìn famines of man's making, 

where the scorching Sirocco 
blows grit into one's eyes,
opening them to a desert 
where one has lost her way.

And that is why I say,
meteorology
should not be kept at bay
to howl like a tempest 
outside the doors of closed minds,
it's concatenation of sounds 
ominous intimations of mortality, 
like the closing cadences 
of a dying dirge,

but should be allowed in, 
in passionate prophecies 
and choral crusades,
in aubades that augur
new awakenings 
in a changing climate,

expanding our understanding 
like yeast in dough, leavening
the bread of sustenance
with the unbearable lightness of being.