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Seasons of our Sadness
Part 1: Summer 2020
It seems overwhelmingly endless, our Season of Sadness.
Dazed, we spin like children on a merry-go-round of
rings and rings of fire
and hosepipes full of water,
smoke clouds and ashes
and trees raining down.
We hardly notice as spring melts into summer.
A summertime where the living is uneasy,
flames are jumping and the temperatures are high.
Unsettled we watch, wide eyed we wait.
Our nostrils filling with the acrid smell of smoke,
our eyes with tears, from the brown haze that hovers over everything,
as the trees rain down.
All spring and summer long the cry echoes from state to state
“Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!”
And all the long while the pollies deliberate, ruminate, speculate.
Carbargo residents irate with hands-in-pocket leaders who procrastinate!
Can’t they see?
Don’t they know?
Fitsimmonds and the firies are our heroes now!
Surrounded by megafires and hosepipes with no water.
Exuding smoke and ashes,
a hundred homes burn down.
Lives destroyed around us
as a hundred homes burn down.
Apocalyptic, summer casts a black towel of terror across our shoulders
as voracious flames lick at the salty waves of holidays.
Abandoned, stranded, vulnerable we take to the water.
In fires past
we counted only human homes,
human lives lost.
This spring, this summer
when the trees rained down,
our collective conscience tells the toll
of helpless beings whose feathers and bones lie
washed up on the shores of inaction.
Our inaction.
Our missing in climate action.
Part 1: Summer 2020
It seems overwhelmingly endless, our Season of Sadness.
Dazed, we spin like children on a merry-go-round of
rings and rings of fire
and hosepipes full of water,
smoke clouds and ashes
and trees raining down.
We hardly notice as spring melts into summer.
A summertime where the living is uneasy,
flames are jumping and the temperatures are high.
Unsettled we watch, wide eyed we wait.
Our nostrils filling with the acrid smell of smoke,
our eyes with tears, from the brown haze that hovers over everything,
as the trees rain down.
All spring and summer long the cry echoes from state to state
“Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!”
And all the long while the pollies deliberate, ruminate, speculate.
Carbargo residents irate with hands-in-pocket leaders who procrastinate!
Can’t they see?
Don’t they know?
Fitsimmonds and the firies are our heroes now!
Surrounded by megafires and hosepipes with no water.
Exuding smoke and ashes,
a hundred homes burn down.
Lives destroyed around us
as a hundred homes burn down.
Apocalyptic, summer casts a black towel of terror across our shoulders
as voracious flames lick at the salty waves of holidays.
Abandoned, stranded, vulnerable we take to the water.
In fires past
we counted only human homes,
human lives lost.
This spring, this summer
when the trees rained down,
our collective conscience tells the toll
of helpless beings whose feathers and bones lie
washed up on the shores of inaction.
Our inaction.
Our missing in climate action.