As Australia burns ...

Photo: Anonymous on Wikipedia.

As Australia suffers from an earlier and more extensive bushfire season, this poem by your editor's nephew Daragh Byrne in Sydney, written a few weeks ago before things really got bad in that area, is a timely thought on the fragility of where we're living.

Bushfire Season

by Daragh Byrne.

(Note: Explorer 6 was the first satellite to send pictures of Earth back from space).

Explorer Six in 1959 gave us
For the first time an eye on ourselves
Peering over Mexico from
Twenty seven thousand kilometres
Tracing a smudge of the Pacific.
It did not see clearly
Beaming back crude streaks
An impressionistic canvas
Requiring the imagination to project
The slopping dangerous majesty
Of the ocean.

Our vision has improved
With time. But we are less keen to look
at ourselves

with anything like clarity.

I wonder at my eyesight staring over
Randwick, this afternoon's low sun
A drunken mess of bleary orange
Melting in the slow grey smoke of
Two states on fire.

I am not imagining.

We are not imagining.

Satellites and
Sydney skies alike tell truths two ways
the world is burning worse.

On the Curragh
In the summer as a child sometimes
The gorse would set alight. Bogs
Can smoulder, the blessing and the curse
Of burning bushes has been with us
Since the start.

Fire speaks to us
Reminds us we are prone to fall apart.
This world, itself a delicate work
Of art, can in mere moments turn
To smoke and dust.

Who will appear to
Lead us from this mess? Of course our chiefs
Would rather brief against the next -
Divert, say now is not the time
To talk of why. They hose us down with
Spouts of blame and set us on a perfect
Course for the world to stay aflame.

Behind the bloody lies reality looks down
Sees through the smoke. Physics
Will not bend for falsity. Satellites
Have seen the path ahead. There has to be
A better way. We must change course.

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