Pigeons in a hot sky
Morning comes
Molten sun
Casts sepia silhouettes
Surreal beauty
Wrought by an atmosphere
Fraught with death
Home in a couple of days
Where battered lungs
Complain for another week
Pigeons in a hot sky
Morning comes
Molten sun
Casts sepia silhouettes
Surreal beauty
Wrought by an atmosphere
Fraught with death
Home in a couple of days
Where battered lungs
Complain for another week
Left to wonder how so few can remember
From where we have come
To where we’ll return
And where we are stuck
Runway clears
Now aloft
Miles high
Above the smog
Crisp blue sky
First in weeks
Smogless air
First I’ve breathed
As a mother purifies herself
In the waters of the holy Ganga
While her daughters prepare
To leap in, yet again
I seek an escape
To the clear air
And verdant greens
Of the countryside
An escape denied
By the pervasive pollution
Of northern India
The beauty of an amber sky
Belies a failure
Of political will
And the premature deaths
Of millons
Once pollution
Once wildfire
Once winter storms
Twice undesired
Once intended
Often spectacular
Demanding
A different
Perspective
And in this lies
A beauty plain
Where truth is told
In high relief
No shadow cast
No grey to mask
On one side white
The other black
A time before
The Clean Air Act of 1970
The Environmental Protection Agency
Which gave the Act bite
And enforced its many regulations
I am reminded of that time
When I travel to countries
Which ignore the science
Or have no political will
To preserve the Earth
Which sustains us