Avert Your Eyes, That’s Not a Sunset, the World is Aflame
It may look beautiful & you may want to stare,
but that’s not the collection of colors
pollution creates over years
spilling into the atmosphere.
So many of our kind
are taking their last breath
in this descending sequence.
Paintbrush stroking splats of orange
across the canvas with rhythmic flicks
as fires feed their appetites with the landscape.
The collective screams sound like birds
flying off in the distance toward south
in a song of farewell to good friends.
We knew this night would come,
we just never thought it’d be
within our own hundred years.
It’ll be a matter of minutes
before the end comes,
you can choose to run
for the cover which
does not exist;
I’ll take in
the view.
____________
Tim Heerdink is the author of Final Flight as the Fog Becomes Night, Somniloquy & Trauma in the Knottseau Well, The Human Remains, Red Flag and Other Poems, Razed Monuments, Checking Tickets on Oumaumua, Sailing the Edge of Time, I Hear a Siren’s Call, Ghost Map, A Cacophony of Birds in the House of Dread, Tabletop Anxieties & Sweet Decay (with Tony Brewer) and short stories “The Tithing of Man” and “HEA-VEN2”. His poems appear in various journals and anthologies. He is the President of Midwest Writers Guild of Evansville, Indiana.
Rusty Truck 