by Dom Bury
In waves it came. But waves so small at first
nobody noticed
the leaves dropping all summer
or the landscape’s frayed
yellow edges or the days we went
without wind. Then winter
packed up and didn’t come back. Then, again —
the glaciers burnt dry and the bears
suddenly without their soft
houses of snow. Then somebody
shot them and we thanked God for our climate’s
new harvest. But then we felt in
our own bodies this new food rotting —
strange heat in the lungs, cancer
ripening where the right meat
should have been and we named them
our own illnesses, maladies of the body
not of the earth the body
builds itself from. But then the earth
turned on us, each new season collapsing
until there was only high summer
and we felt then how the land must—
aching and empty and still we reached
into ourselves pulling up nothing. Or rather
not nothing but another new desert,
another woodland cut free of song.
Only then did our bodies turn themselves on
to protest like sirens in a city
that has already been bombed.
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