Forest Fire

·  The Earth Warms  ·

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I think of the coldest place, and even here, the earth warms.

This artwork shows the last surviving trees of a far off tundra, not fifty years from now, alight. The ice blue-white snow in this most remote wilderness offers no protection as the blaze takes hold at its centre.

The image foreshadows the outcome of human unrestrained harm towards all life upon and within the world. X marks the spot where, before their end, giant perennial wooded plants rose in measureless terrain that covered whole continents. We witness the emaciated haunted forms of creatures at its edge. Formally, the kings and queens of realms that now lay crumbled as the rising seas take hold.

 

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Anesthetized

 

I like to think I know,

I like to live for now,

I like to say I care for all the world to see,

I like that others like the I of me.

Now is not my time to change,

Not yet, but soon...

Perhaps.

 

Now is nothing more than what is mine, this day,

This, my hour of ease,

My pleasure sensed,

My all is self, possessed, conceit,

I look the other way from certain consequence.

 

The wind blows,

The waters rise,

The storm of forest fire,

My life before the fall, anesthetized.

 

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The Fall: an imagined time when changes to the earth's climate cause a pivotal decline to life as ecosystems fail.

With this poem I think of myself as someone who acts only for my immediate pleasure and interest. I do not show myself as someone who intends to harm, but who harms through self absorption and inaction. My life before the fall seems tiny in its force, and yet my life when charged with love, with thought and care for life, awakes.

Even small things: a picture and a poem, give voice and might to change.

 

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A full size extract follows below: