Poem

Warning 

Alarms are going off.

The lights are all strobing. 

Municipal sirens wailing,

A skein of geese is honking

As they fly low over my back deck.

The warnings are all around us;

It’s a widespread global panic.

That time the engines went out on my plane

Halfway over the North Atlantic.

The flames flickering from the port side wing,

The sudden thousand foot drop,

Stewards collapsed crying in the galley
As we looped around back to Gander
With the sea rising to meet us

Icebergs and not enough dinghies,

It’s hard to get the count just right.

A vast underestimation 

Of the effects of gravity,

Of the full steam ahead on the Titanic.

Shovel another heap of coal onto the fires.

Burn the whole pile of black earth..

The trains are arriving in the east,

Screeching iron on iron,

The women to the right, men to the left.

The gander strut and stick out their chests.

The geese get no rest.

The migration south is now unending.

Too many people go about their business
without a care, without proper sense of tragedy.

I can't see the geese;

Haunted warnings from behind the low gray clouds,

Or perhaps plumes of acrid smoke,
you cant tell sometimes.

The blackened hillside of charred trees,

The shadows thin and pitiful.

Above, the sky looks clawed,
the fading white contrails of attacking planes,

the leaves turning, falling.

October feels like summer.

It's getting warmer and warmer.

The birds don't even have to leave.

11/23/19