The Earth is More Immense
Wide open flaming mouth of dragon,
Rising feathered wing of phoenix,
fly into the flames of your nightmares
and expand there, for we can only change
when what has encased us perishes…
and so a madness spreads through the mind
of a landscape too worn down by industry,
disease, money-making, and the viruses
of animals penned too long in tract homes.
The earth itself seethes, and rivers run dry,
hardened mud cracks where plants grew
and fires begin to roar from man’s creations,
the cigarettes, campfires, bullets, ignorance,
and more than can be contained any longer flame
from sheltered canyons, the dried dead trees
flaring suddenly upward and laying their smoke
and ash across a countryside grown hot
as the iron of its machinery driven lust.
It is a hot, hard grind, and homes are lost
and lives are lost, and each year the cost is greater.
A civilization cannot contemplate its coming end
when its leaders’ lungs are filled with the ash
that remains from its dreams and odysseys.
They cannot plan when their lungs are filled with death.
I have seen it all, from the faintest flicker of grass fires
to the cascading walls of flame surrounding mountain towns
cut off from the highways that were their birth
to the raging ovens of flames that come for all…
the deer, the moose, the squirrels, the mountain lions,
all that is innocent, and man in his ignorance.
The earth is more immense in its little part of the cosmos
than all the bombs we have dropped in all our wars.
And there are rules of physics and matter and mortality
that are understood by water and rock and mass
and absence itself in the mystery of space that are not
in the understanding of the imperfections we call life.