Day, Breaking

A Poem

We have had so many bad forest fire years in Western Canada in the past decade or so that I can no longer remember which summer I wrote this poem about. 2021, maybe? It first appeared in the late-lamented British journal Raceme in the summer of 2022.

Day, Breaking

The sunrise this morning from my rented deck
Wasn’t so much beautiful as violent – 
Skies as bloodied as the balled-up handkerchiefs 
Of children dying of tuberculosis
Scared and alone. It was a baby, newborn 
And not yet washed, screaming for the body that
Expelled her. This is the summer of smoke. 
The trees are burning up in four directions:
Even three hundred miles away we smell it.