JERUSALEM TRACK

The smoke has become
another season.

An element.

It's collecting around the trees making
their leaves seem weighted, a curve
in that trunk suggesting recoil but
everything is just
doing the business as I walk through a forest
that's anticipating the coming
feast of fire under a chanting mat of cicadas.

Elsewhere flames explode on touch
rich eucalypt oils,
minute white flowers lost in a sunburst.

Will my season end so
dark smudged & furious? Perhaps
there is no alternative
- summers never surrender -
it's always declared war against heat
by an undermining wind as the world turns over
to warm its other half.

I write this as I sit
on an outcrop looking down at the Hawkesbury
watching the young man climbing the slope
(so much energy,
spraying uselessly).

Turn see an old man behind,
not embarrassed to be caught in his thoughts over me.

So we too are seasons.

We too are smoke. Free & inevitable.

Les Wicks
poem published in The Ways of Waves