The Forecast for 17 August 24

The mountains
are burning up near
Moose Factory, Ontario.

The local weatherman with whom
we consult, as we once did the
sad saints of our childhood,
says that today’s weather will be
partly cloudy with smoke.

Same for the next day.
Our New Hampshire hills are
remaining obscured, even after
we have rubbed the gloom from
our smoke-afflicted eyes.

The firemen of Canada have
only pale maps of remote places
which dot that vast frontier,
places their hoses won’t reach.

They have little to say about when
the August sun will reappear above
our summer, sharp as a shard of
shattered crystal on a backdrop of
sky declaring its perfect blueness.

Our weatherman says this
will be especially bad for
the feeble, the tender old, the
tender young and the vulnerable.

But who among us is not
among the vulnerable,
these days as the fires are burning,
and history itself is burning across
the face of this rumbling blue sphere?

DANIEL THOMAS MORAN, the former poet laureate of Suffolk County, NY, is the author of seventeen collections of poems. He has had some four hundred fifty poems published in twenty-five countries and his collected papers are being archived by Stony Brook University. He lives in New Hampshire.