FAIRY WORLD Like an explorer of new worlds, I wander into forests of trees stripped bare of green, stark silhouettes still standing strong despite all that they have weathered.
Morning feels hallucinogenic, a mix of smoke and mist as the warmth of the newly risen sun lifts up tendrils of moisture to meet dry vapors of distant fires drifting East on changing currents.
In this eerie, almost apocalyptic glow, blue-black Ravens gather in groups, their chortling and strident caws sounding slightly conspiratorial, if only we had the keys to decode their communications, secret to us,
A flock of sweet songbirds descends with a whoosh upon a lone gray sentinel of a living tree long gone, each takes up a perch and remains still, silence fills the heavy air, redolent of burnt carbon.
How do their tiny lungs breathe in this Plutonian atmosphere - what plan of action do they have for this?
Like denizens of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” birds of a feather gather together, they come and go chattering of COP26. As if a scene of Poe, the Ravens I imagine, “quoth nevermore, nevermore.”