Electricity and engines
Polymers and composites
Production lines and factories
I could not make
A single thing I’ve brought
Smoky.
The smell of a campfire.
But the nearest fire set a hundred thousand trees alight, a hundred or more kilometers away. I wonder, was that one lightning? A cigarette? A carelessly managed fire?
You see
The mighty columns say
This once was plain
Withered away
Exposing us
The roots of Earth
Soon enough
More rain will come
Erode the land
You’re rooted on
Until you fall
Then come to rest
As dust beneath
Our hoodoo feet
Among the desert’s
Many victims:
My haughty ego
And petty worries
Matters unworthy
Of a life
Worth living
When the flash came
Night became a day like no other
Just several seconds long
With the intensity of a hundred suns
When the flash came
I was happy not to be in a doorway
As I watched the paint sizzle
In the nuclear sunlight
For pilgrims and believers
A gift to Ganga, river goddess
Holy of holies
Source and purifier
To build the pyres
For funeral blaze
Lit from embers
Of Shiva’s fire
Burns every hour
Of every day
Four thousand years
And still today
And then it does
But only for a moment
Until something else
Pulls it away
In this visual cacophony
Of a culture traveler’s feast
He lived
In oblivion
Surrounded by
Possibility
But the cold wind soon enough warms
While all life passes in time
And even the granite
Breaks down to pebbles
Then sand, then dust
Lifted by the wind
Pix to Words 