Firebird
While a continent becomes a sore
spreading to shingle the destitute globe,
we lie wrapped in broiling
blinded
abeyance, knee-jerking a galvanic
response that is only more of nothing.
The
colossus god-thief's
gone
small as a pea no longer green
beside
his golden foundry,
abandoned
like a warped wheel
murdered
by its own machine,
shamed to a face in a clockwork locket
that's dropped too hot on a
that's dropped too hot on a
cowskulled outback
where
fire tornadoes are the new djinns
where the breath of burned brush leaves
a path
of smoking cinder,
where even the dirt
is
beginning to burn.
We are
the thing that un-cocks
the
flower gun, whose
apocalypse hand
knifemelts the Mother, making
her bleed a drowning of ice-water tides,
the mad un-scientists who
breed
the firebird to rise and rise again.
We are
numberless now, an ashslide of rapists
pressing
our weight against a mouth that
would be willing
if only it
could breathe.
~March
2013
(originally written as quite a different poem)
Repurposed January 2020
for earthweal
Image: Photograph via internet, showing the Australian wildfires of 2019/20 from space. Fair Use
