Old Warriors

image borrowed from yahoo

Old Warriors

darkness at noon,

there was a fire

in 

 the 

    mountains,

               and

                  now

                     the

                       desert

                           is

               covered

                   with

                    a

             black 

         fog,

a roaring crackling snarling thing

that devours everything in its path,

lambasting the lushness

of gray-green-brown,

burning,

the sky alive with cinders and sparks,

burning,

arousing arroyos,

burning,

choking canyons,

burning,

toppling great trees,

burning

as if the earth was angry

and it had spewed out magma

like molten spittle

through granite teeth,

a sea of sagebrush afire,

the oil within bursting into flames,

animals fleeing,

whole towns gutted,

rag dolls, lincoln logs, mansions,

barns, silos, horses, cattle, sheep,

all burned

converted cruelly

to blister and char;

people standing in sad huddles

on high ground, weeping and praying

horns honking,

children hysterical;

firefighters with watery weary eyes

in hard soot-smeared faces,

carrying big shovels

with arms that ached

from twenty-two hours of labor,

with blackened gashes

in their broken helmets,

asleep on their feet,

moving thickly through a macabre nightmare

of death songs,

a whole countryside burning

with fifty kinds of blood

on the sun as creatures

struggling in the hellish haze

raised their swollen eyes

to the dark clouds above,

fire clouds, that suddenly

expelled torrents of reddish-orange rain--

as the aged metallic angels swarmed

out of the east with the gracious

gift of fire retardants,

and the cheers began

for the red-nosed fire warriors,

the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress,

the Gruman PBY Supercat,

the Lockheed C-130 Hercules

and the big kahuna--

the Evergreen 747 Supertanker,

as the arrogance of the fire

was reduced to the shame

of steam, and people shouted

until they were hoarse,

thank you, thank you,

goddamn it,

thank you.

Glenn Buttkus   

May 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets--Poetics

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