4 Poems About Wildfire, Climate Change and Loss
This piece is part of a two-part series on climate change, poetry and solastalgia — the distress caused by environmental change happening in one's own home. In her companion essay, Alexandria Herr writes about the poems below and interviews two poets about how ecopoetry might help us understand climate change and find a path forward.
this beginning may have always meant this end
By Camille T. Dungy
coming from a place where we meandered mornings and met quail, scrub jay, mockingbird, i knew coyote, like everyone else, i knew cactus, knew tumbleweed, lichen on the rocks and pill bugs beneath, rattlers sometimes, the soft smell of sage and the ferment of cactus pear. coming from this place, from a place where grass might grow greener on the hillside in winter than in any yard, where, the whole rest of the year, everything i loved, chaparral pea, bottle brush tree, jacaranda, mariposa, pinyon and desert oak, the kumquat in the back garden and wisteria vining the porch, the dry grass whispering long after the last rains, raccoons in and out of the hills, trash hurled by the hottest wind, the dry grass tall now and golden, lawn chairs, eucalyptus, everything, in a place we knew, every thing, we knew, little and large and mine and ours, except horror, all of it, everything could flame up that quickly, could flare and be gone.
Camille T. Dungy:"this beginning may have always meant this end" came out in a tumble as I watched coverage of the catastrophic fires that raged through California in 2017, at the time, the most devastating fire season in American history. More than 1.5 million acres burned. But, even then, I knew that was only the beginning of these horrific events. I’ve spent time around such fires myself, inhaling the all-too-familiar smell of smoke, reminded of the perpetual threat that hovered over the California hillside community where I grew up. There is something different about sudden catastrophe that isn’t really a surprise, and in this poem, I want to capture something of the rush and tumble of beauty and horror and resignation and resistance that is part of living in the American West, in fire country, in contemporary times.
This poem originally appeared in Poetry, April 2018.
Particulate Matter
By Molly Fisk
If all you counted were tires on the cars left in driveways and stranded beside the roads.
Melted dashboards and tail lights, oil pans, window glass, seat belt clasps.
The propane tanks in everyone's yards, though we didn't hear them explode.
R-13 insulation. Paint, inside and out. The liquor store's plastic letters in puddled
colors below their charred sign. Each man-made sole of every shoe in all those closets.
The laundromat's washers' round metal doors.
But then Arco, Safeway, Walgreens, the library—everything they contained.
How many miles of electrical wire and PVC pipe swirling into the once-blue sky:
how many linoleum acres? Not to mention the valley oaks, the ponderosas, all the wild
hearts and all the tame, their bark and leaves and hooves and hair and bones, their final
cries, and our neighbors: so many particular, precious, irreplaceable lives that despite
ourselves we're inhaling.
Molly Fisk:I wrote this poem after the Camp Fire was contained in Paradise, CA, where 85 lives were lost. I live 50 miles away. A friend was running the domestic animal housing operation for the survivors at a nearby county fairground so I was in close touch with stories about the devastation. We'd been wreathed in smoke for weeks and something about her stories and the smoke caused me to think more specifically about exactly what we were breathing in. I'm a literal person. Plus the linguistic link of particulate to particular struck a chord.
This poem originally appeared in Rattle, November 2018.
FIRE ENGINES
By stevie redwood
I’ve been listening to the rain whisper
through my sleep machine for months
of skin-dry winter, when we thirst most
for refuge & other bodies. Seasons no longer
divide themselves predictably into the year.
Fall overwinters into a sluggish spring. Summer’s
drought-cracked face saran-wrapped onto telephone poles
broadcasts an august reward.
Fire season erupts onto the landscape
six weeks premature, fishhooked by tempest
& overgrowth. Here’s California painting
an impression of itself, bleary & bled out
onto the canvas like a frigid sweat. Burned-out tree trunks
stippling the earth’s soiled leather like a six o’clock shadow.
Too late, too long. Too soon gone.
The ground thirsts for respite & water
bodies, desiccated & desperate
to burn. & we haven’t yet got to the heat
of the matter—which is, as ever,
people are dying who could be saved.
Or: people aren’t dying so much as being
extinguished. Snuffed out. Too soon. Too gone.
Fire season rampages far too long, fanned by generations
of negligence & genocidal engines. Fire
fighters, long culled from cages, ambushed
& felled by many contagions: a lung-hungry virus.
A death-hungry violence. The warfare of property.
By the time of the spread: too few hands left
to dig out the fire lines. Too many holocausts
at once. Here’s America performing
its theatres of siege: infernal, so hungry
to extinguish its people & light
every match.
stevie redwood:I live in coastal california, where the landscape is the landscape: farmsprawl, seaways, oak-gnarled hills. in recent years, the landscape has also been a firescape, inescapable in its smoke & scope. in considering my relationship to climate cataclysm, i think about settler colonialism & the ways i am implicated at once in its existence & its obliteration. i've been studying the mechanisms that structure organized deathmaking to understand where & how "we" can antagonize it. my hope with "F I R E E N G I N E S" is to thread together the violences of racial capitalism, colonial warfare, borders & states, climate catastrophe, & the world(s) we are all responsible for making & remaking. poetry won’t remake the world; we need material solidarity & direct confrontation. but perhaps a poetics against capitalist extraction, exploitation, & hierarchy can move people closer to their revolutionary potential. A DIFFERENT END OF THE WORLD IS POSSIBLE.
This poem originally appeared in Protean, February 2022.
A Sonnet at the Edge of the Reef
By Craig Santos Perez
The Waikīkī Aquarium
We dip our hands into the outdoor reef exhibit
and touch sea cucumber and red urchin
as butterflyfish swim by. A docent explains:
once a year, after the full moon, when tides swell
to a certain height, and saltwater reaches the perfect
temperature, only then will the ocean cue coral
polyps to spawn, in synchrony, a galaxy of gametes,
which dances to the surface, fertilizes, opens,
forms larvae, roots to seafloor, and grows, generation
upon generation. At home, we read a children’s
book, The Great Barrier Reef, to our daughter
snuggling between us in bed. We don’t mention
corals bleaching, reared in labs, or frozen.
And isn’t our silence, too, a kind of shelter?
Craig Santos Perez:I wrote this poem after visiting the Waikiki Aquarium, where they have an outdoor, interactive reef exhibit. My daughter loved touching the water, coral, urchin, and starfish. The docent taught us about the phenomenon of coral spawning, and I will never forget the look of awe and wonder that flooded my daughter’s face. That night, we read a book about reefs. I felt sadness because I knew that corals are bleaching and struggling to survive in the Pacific. I decided to not tell her about this as a form of protection against reality, just as a reef protects a vulnerable island from a coming storm.
This poem originally appeared in Habitat Threshold, 2020.
