AS WE BURN

On a day in mid September

Overcast like dark December

I find myself unwilling member

To latent ever-burning embers,

Amidst the calls of songbirds tender,

Smothering the sky above.

Boughed on oak, there flits a dove,

A glinting greydrawn whisper of

This hazy, foggy, misty fuzz

Consuming all I know and love.

A fit of fallow, long forgotten

Lies beside my path, well-trodden,

And tells a tale with timbers rotten

Of gilded-gains now ill-begotten;

Empty land endlessly boughten.

Painted smoke, this pang of sorrow

Wanders inward towards tomorrow,

Ever-bending, thirsty willows

Draw my weary eyes like easy pillows

Down to water ducks now borrow.

I must be going, time not unending

And while the willows, ever-bending

Seem like arms of earth extending,

I know this planet needs more tending,

And father time grows tired of lending.

Some prose thoughts after –

I walked a nature path near my home and the smoke hung like a thick blanket over the land, smothering me, making it hard to breathe after a short while. I lamented our lack of forest management, our lack of understanding of the various mechanisms broadcast daily that affect our ever-changing environment, and I couldn’t help feeling a sense of doom. It all felt like a horrifying game I played once called Silent Hill. I spoke of the life I saw, and the decay of the land beside this patch of nature that was strewn with debris and sorely mismanaged itself. I sat on a stump and wrote this, coming back and editing it some later. But the feeling of grey unknown washing over me, that didn’t leave, even when I went inside.