This Island Earth

Every paradise trembles in anticipation of it’s own wound. Whether it should arrive by forces of nature, birthed by heat and time, or the small hands of centuries and harvest, the blood waits to be a drawn; a bruised earth, that holds it’s children close, ignoring tooth and claw.
Our heavens were laid out before us, but in a skin we could not recognize. The leopard with miraculous spots we had not imagined. Did the land we chose to blossom upon also, in some unknowable way, choose us? Each island a mother; every sunlit hour an offering to these benevolent gods upon whose backs we carved our lives.