Last Remains
It was a feeble sun
orange, dull, smouldering
through the haze
that had drifted, and settled
windless.
The acrid smell of smoke
singed our nostrils
made sensitive eyes water,
the insensitive
blink hard.
The forest, on fire
somewhere north
not far.
In this heavy humid heat
where we move with weary slowness,
as if the air was viscous
our bodies spent,
I could imagine the end of times.
A planet, grown tired
of human interference.
And why does it bring to mind
the smell of human flesh
burning,
of ovens, stoked high
to incinerate
the evidence?
Which the good citizens
downwind
can’t miss,
averting their heads
and going about
their business.
Or bring to mind
the shattered neck
of the ornamental urn?
Sifting through the ash
to find
the scorched teeth, that always survive,
fragments of blackened bone.
The last remains
might smell the same
as this.
The expert on the radio says
the forest must burn
to renew itself.
As it has, so far
for as long as it’s existed.
The soil enriched.
Seeds, germinated by heat.
The badly charred limbs of trees
an unforgiving nursery.
Wild fire
closing-in on the city,
just over the horizon.
Power-lines
explode into flame
like matchsticks.
A chain reaction
counting-down.
A bad forest fire season: hot, humid, wind-driven, and lack of rain.
The sun looked that way this morning.
The smell of woodsmoke in the air -- here, on the edge of the city -- makes your nostrils flare. This is not the comforting aroma of a woodstove on a cold winter night. There is something unhealthy to it: the greasy smell of something partially burned; the whiff of disease.
I have built my home in a forest that must inevitably burn. I'm not sure what to make of this. Denial? Magical thinking? Hubris?
I'm sorry for the morbid turn of mind. But the unavoidable feeling was of condemned people anxiously moving about in the early stages of apocalypse. Perhaps payback for the accumulated debt of environmental collapse; of our own folly; of our collective legacy of inhumanity.
The smell of woodsmoke in the air -- here, on the edge of the city -- makes your nostrils flare. This is not the comforting aroma of a woodstove on a cold winter night. There is something unhealthy to it: the greasy smell of something partially burned; the whiff of disease.
I have built my home in a forest that must inevitably burn. I'm not sure what to make of this. Denial? Magical thinking? Hubris?
I'm sorry for the morbid turn of mind. But the unavoidable feeling was of condemned people anxiously moving about in the early stages of apocalypse. Perhaps payback for the accumulated debt of environmental collapse; of our own folly; of our collective legacy of inhumanity.
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