Mourning - Claire Drucker

[Larry Robinson]

Mourning
That other fire started from a love letter
an irate forest service worker
whose passion got the best of her
in a CO campground with woodpeckers digging for worms a hawk 
wheeling above some scattered stars.
This might have been a kiss from the earth
a wake-up call, to evacuate our ways
to get out of those metal boxes heating up atmosphere and oceans, if 
only we don’t hang up pretend it’s an aberration, if only
we’d sit up and listen to the crackle, like so many, fleeing for their lives.
How far can a crisis extend before ash turns to
blackened dust in our hands and we forget
what’s at stake? Eyes sting, throat raw, the lungs
thick with days of smoke. Animals and people, gone.
Homes full of photo albums, junk drawers, rubber bands, gone. Streets, 
hotels, lampposts, businesses, gone.
Where will they sleep, in a county with a 1% vacancy rate before the 
calamity, this place within but not outside, that has no name, 
no residence, no country?
This is our Syria, our war zone, racing from smoke and flames, waking up 
at 3am to check
evacuation updates, fire containment, no power, boiling water, trying to 
locate friends and family, those who couldn’t run, elders on stretchers, 
glued to the radio, shelters overflowing. The language of disaster, a 
vocabulary none of us
knew how to fit in our mouths, now rolling out fluently, like the masks 
covering our faces, ubiquitous, as if we have
forgotten how to breathe in a world un-dominated by chaos.
For hours at the shelter, I sort clothes, and toiletries,
box them up, bring them in, go back for more.
Trucks with supplies stop and unload: shoes, sun hats, diapers, 
hand sanitizer, shampoo, underwear, towels, soap. Generosity opens up my 
lungs,
smoke closes them down. Grief and love, excitement
and fear live in the same part of the brain, she says
the heart burns up into tiny scraps and the only salve is
more giving and this gratitude of breathing
from sink to desk, back to phone, aimless, unmoored, wandering in 
unfamiliar territory
the body exhausted
these people, my community,
suffering. 

      - Claire Drucker