fire
on the mountain
fire in the mind
ashes ashes
we all fall down

The Smokies: ridge beyond ridge of ancient mountains, wrapped in a soft blue haze of rain and the moist outbreath of trees. The highest peaks are temperate rain forest, mossy and dripping. But now the picture changes...because the climate changes. Hot smoke replaces the gentle mist as fire consumes the forest, tinder-dry after months of heat and drought. Crown fires leap from treetop to treetop. High winds drive a firestorm through Gatlinburg, trapping people in their homes where they burn to death. Several days have passed and children are still missing. The Appalachian Trail smolders.

smoke
from distant wildfires
fills my lungs...
I dream of the blue planet,
one seed sprouting in ash

Pollen grains tell stories. Drifting like gold dust on a cold wind, grass pollen sifts into lakes, to be buried in mud for 20,000 years. Grass pollen tells of an Ice-Age Europe covered with open steppes where forests should have grown—the climate favored trees, not grasses. But layers of ash tell stories, too—the story of fires that burned the forests, fires set by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who transformed their world long before the first factory smokestacks began to spew their plumes of ash and deadly gases.

sparks
from a stone-age campfire
scorch the map
crumpled in my hand
a dusty oak leaf

—Finalist, KYSO Flash “One Life, One Earth” Writing Challenge

Jenny Angyal

grew up wandering woods and fields in Connecticut and wrote her first poem at the age of five. After attending a one-room schoolhouse, she spent a number of years studying and writing about biology, and a number more teaching nonverbal children how to communicate. She lives on a small organic farm in Gibsonville, North Carolina, with her husband and one Abyssinian cat. She began writing tanka in 2008 and finds it to be the perfect vehicle for exploring the relationship between the landscapes that lie within and without. Moonlight on Water, her debut collection of tanka, tanka sequences, and tanka prose, was released by Skylark Publishing in August 2016.

The poet’s blog: The Grass Minstrel