ELEGY No. I do not want wildfires to be a metaphor any more than 43,000 hectares of forests disappearing one summer—cut short. No. I do not want to be kept up all night, thinking about the reasons why some homes melted into a puddle while others are spared or how a black bear had to be euthanized after losing its paws. No. I do not want to google the meaning behind a burnt bird falling before my feet or how a tree can burn from the inside unseen by the naked eye and then fall over. It is September now. Rain came too little, too late. We drive past Squilax, the mountain lost all her trees and like you—none of them are coming back.
ASHES I, for one am returning to ashes when the lines on my map are reduced to ashes since trees I could have kissed burned down to a crisp, every prayer is now reduced to ashes I can’t pray anymore, save the Lord’s Prayer O how Jonah made Nineveh sit in her ashes it is sunny today, wind moderate, though smoky our children still play in the yard against ashes the birds on the trees call for their mother they know not where to go for the sky rains ashes and now I’ll find five things to be grateful for though ten years with you are now burnt to ashes
Note: Elegy was first published in Vita Poetica and Ashes was published here last year.
These poems capture so much I relate to. Ashes on the car. The sun that can’t make it through the smoke. The fires have been close but we’ve never been in danger but I moved here the year of the Oakland fire and I couldn’t get to my apartment on the other side of the hills.
These poems are stunning. And searing, and wow. I just held my breath through them.