Dixie



Packing to evacuate
is a game of Tetris
trying to jam your whole life
into a car.

Flames don't cast shadows
but they level homes.

The sun has no mercy
and the wind is grim.
Embers light up the hillside.
Birds explode from trees
as it crowns the ridge. 

Firefighters climb
helicopters carry water  
and retardant, yet fire 
consumes the other side
to shut down highway 89.

Like a child doing cartwheels
it bounds across the land.   
Then it lays down and makes love
to the undergrowth.

Columns of smoke rise.
Angry dragon clouds form
breathing more fire.

Life becomes 
an apocalyptic movie
flames flank the race out of town.

In less than thirty minutes
history erased
lives displaced
homes, businesses
childhoods
up in smoke.

Scattered bricks
mangled metal and soot
are all that remain.

__________________________________


I wrote this last year while the Dixie fire was burning. I hope it was okay to send it to you. I was inspired by the fire. I didn't know Greenville was your hometown until later. I am very sorry about the devastation and loss.

I am not real happy with the end of this one, but I am never happy with the endings of my poems. 

Fire clouds, also known as pyrocumulus clouds formed during the Dixie fire and made conditions worse for firefighters by causing lightning strikes which sparked more fires. 

















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lessons from the Sky

Lessons from the Sky It's been a taffy pull year and a half time stretched resources stretched  sanity stretched. I feel like water gathered in an old tire  as days trickle downhill.  It's tough to move on  when the whole world is in a time out but I'm getting to a place where I like myself again.  Still, time feels like a toy lost in childhood.  I've spent so much of it reading the horizon watching clouds drift. I've chased metaphors sank into similes played hide-and-seek with allusions but my muse has been stingy all it can muster is angst.  I don't care what those  scientific studies say chocolate kisses  don't make me feel loved.  I'm okay being alone never needed anybody to complete me, but just once it would be nice  to have someone  toss pebbles at my window someone to share poetry and music with explore science and Shakespeare with someone with whom I can  match wits.  I wasted too many years with a man w...
Read more

Wilted

 Wilted  He found me like a wild rose on the roadside I was thumbin’ my way to work. He was a clinging vine; transplanted himself into my world.   Soon we were tangled together around a picket fence dream. We couldn’t afford to paint that fence white even with me working two jobs it stayed that gray shade of weathered wood. But who needs fresh paint anyway? He had his cigarettes, I had my kaleidoscope, and we read Xaviera Hollander guide to mind-blowing sex together.   After the children were born he acted like the world was a slot machine and it was somehow my fault it wouldn’t come up all cherries. And I made lots of lemonade from all those lemons he brought home but he would only drink gourmet coffee.   I think of him often now, and sharply, like when I pretend his neck is the rose stem I am clipping. There are times I want to shred the leather jacket he forgot to take   and turn every photo of him left into confetti but my memory softens with an old son...
Read more

Sept 11, 2001

It begins with a boom and a fireball wreckage rains, sirens race   black smoke billows.  Papers float like confused confetti looking for a parade.  How many people cry out to God  when they see a second plane hit  the phallus of American capitalism?   Eyes glued, mouths open we watch people jump helpless to help them. Then comes a roar  louder than Niagara. Day turns to night  in lower Manhattan. A hole in the sky  a tomb of three thousand.  Those who can't outrun the rushing cloud  duck into delis and lobbies the towers in their eyes and lungs.     Cars covered in ash broken windows and stray shoes. Everything else either  blown out or burned up.  Fire trucks and firemen  buried in debris. People covered in dust struggle to breathe.  The fright in their faces  still haunts me. 
Read more