California Wildfires ’17

They came.
Crept up on us,
in the middle of the night.
In darkness,
the Diablo Devil winds
Howling, fanning flames,
Sending spooky sparks &
Ember imps, flying over hilltops and trees,
and skittering across roads, highways and boulevards.
Spreading mischief, conjuring up an evil
haze of dry, orange & black
smoky, choking air.
California dreams turned nightmarish.
Suddenly, and unrelenting.

Everything seems to be burning.
Words like, apocalyptic, devastation, scary,
other worldly—Moonscapish
come to mind.
It is the scorched Earth.
Come back to haunt us.
A desolate landscape is all that is left.
Trees, People, homes, gardens, vineyards,
Gone.

Days later while escaping,
Fleeing, in search of cleaner air,
One can still see plumes of terrifying toxic smoke
from the sky.
The fires rage on. We find,
It’s hard to breathe particulate.

I think of Kingsolver’s words:
“The fire ran ahead at times, and sometimes flagged,
as if growing tired, like the rest of us.
The heat was unspeakable.
I imagined the taste of water.”*

Dazed survivors gaze at each other;
and at their charred and ruined things.
After fleeing terror, in the middle of the night,
Escaping with their lives, tracing the tracks of sooty tears,
Days spent in evacuation despair.
The Firefighters are still at war.

Loss, exhaustion, raw grief and disbelief makes us all equals.
Makes us all care.

What will rise from these ashes?
I believe a Healing Hope;
In the Courage to Create & to Re-Create
To build, and rebuild,
with the innate tools we possess like
Music, Dance, Poetry,
Theater, Painting, Photography.
Mapping the path back to reality &
Helping us to See beyond the Seeming
Abyss.

© Nashormeh Lindo, All Rights Reserved.
10/12/17
Portland, Oregon

(*Excerpt From “The Poisonwood Bible”, by Barbara Kingsolver)