~2018
It was another summer of fires.
I was reading Lawrence’s incendiary The Rainbow.
Someone near (I dare not name) was seeking
sympathy in therapy but too drought-wrought
to receive it. Yes, yes, limbs were boiling off
in California. Of course, of course (the new
mode of normal), Canada’s west coast
was making all those healthy bronchioles ill.
Even here black bears were mad with another
season of scabbed-black blueberries.
When it rained, and mostly it didn’t,
the sear earth swallowed without showing
any sign she was moving her lips.
Come September, a strange thing happened,
an aberrant behaviour. It rained enough
to fill to its top a green test tube.
My adult child looked at me and said,
I know it’s a lie but it feels like
global warming isn’t. She mused,
Maybe I don’t have to live in fear.
Looking straight ahead she added,
And no man will breach my oriflamme body.
