Life In the Apocalypse

Ray Chavez / The Mercury News / Getty Images 

The sky is blood-red orange,
alien and terrifying, as if
we have landed on Mars.
North of the raging inferno,
in southern B.C., we breathe in smoke,
watch in disbelief as
the entire West Coast of the United States
is swallowed by the voracious flames.
The coffee cools in my cup,
my heart holds a vast silence
as I watch the planet I love burning up.
This is how a heart goes numb
in order to withstand the apocalypse.

The orange man moves his lips,
saying nothing, with the compassion
of a vampire; it's Democrat states burning.
This is where politics has arrived:
it is an ugly place to be, governmental denial
of the climate crisis
as the whole world burns.

But, in the burning counties,
there are citizens helping citizens.
There are men running into the flames to fight them,
as everyone else runs away.
This is heroism in the apocalypse.

I have trouble finding the words;
the devastation is too vast.
Armageddon has come, as we knew it would.
Perhaps we hoped we'd slip away in time,
but here it is, in our faces:
the great Earth Mother is dying.
We have waited too long.
Oregon is preparing for
a "mass fatality incident".
We cannot imagine how large
the death toll will be.
Plus all the hidden deaths, never recorded,
of millions of creatures, large and small, 
lost in a world of fire, becoming ash.
My mind can't grasp the enormity; I drink my coffee,
as the end of the world is recorded,
in living (dying?) colour, on my tv screen.
This is survival in the apocalypse.

The news shows a photo of 13-year-old Wyatt Toftie,
who died in flames in a car with his dog in his lap.
And now the tears come, for this
is the face of the apocalypse; this is its grief:
a small terrified boy and his dog
dying the most horrible death one can imagine.
This is heartbreak in the apocalypse.

The story doesn't end here.
We will be watching these flames a while,
counting the toll, in human death,
in burned-out towns, as the wild ones
flee in terror - or are caught by the flames -
and the domestic animals left behind
by their humans, waiting for their return,
are consumed by the endless hunger
of this fiery holocaust.
(Leaving an animal behind is something
I will never understand.)

This is where we are now.
Perhaps we have crossed the point
of no return.
But the story doesn't end here.
All of this is being recorded.
This is life in the crosshairs
of the apocalypse.

for earthweal's open link. Sigh.

After "Surviving the Apocalypse" by Nina Evans, and Wild Writing with Laurie Wagner