Revelation Days

For Ali & Thomas

THE DAYS have turned Biblical, warnings
    Come to pass.
                            Warmings have quickened fast,
 
Like sand, and suns have turned prodigal. Dooms
    Have fashioned rooms in which we still refuse
 
To wake.  Jung always said uncomfortable
    Truths we refused to inhabit would grow
 
Monstrous in the darkness of our stubborn
    Inattention—till they took over the joint
 
We thought we ran.
 
                            ~
                           
                               And so, one day
    It’s fires burning all the green in every
 
Southeast forest brown and downing every
    Song; and the next day it’s the drought
 
Come to town on the north wind, a red scrim
    Varnished over everything at dawn;
 
And the day yet, it’s hail hard as retribution
    And heavy as artillery fire on the capital;
 
And for many days then, it’s smoke where sun-
    Light used to play, smoke become the nation’s
 
Largest export (after coal and overpriced
    Education); until it’s fire again, for these are
 
Days you cannot douse, and then it’s Darling
    Showers, and then it’s thunderstorms
 
At breakfast, when you could’ve done with them
    At dusk, when day refused to dampen
 
And the seabreeze—where it always washes in—
    Refused to swell.
 
                            ~      
                          
                            And just now for a moment
 
In a morning rain the miners make a contra-
    Puntal noise about, you could almost begin again
 
To imagine that we and all the living things
    The temperate earth had hosted for so long
 
Had not become the weather’s orphans,
    The days a climatic concentration camp,
 
The suburbs the leading edge of the sort
    Of catastrophe you conjure by neglect.
 
And on the windchime’s tip one drip hangs
    Tough against all that wants to change.