Hiraeth

My heart cries out from deep within my breast,
A wailing, keening, tearing of the night,
That cries unfelt, unheard by all the rest
Who share this dawn, this soft, cascading light.
Awake at last, my soul -- bereft, forlorn,
Swift rises to the challenge of the day,
And stands, and shakes, the cost of being torn,
Homesick, from dreams of comfort far away;
From darkness-opened doors to warmth and peace,
Enough to eat, and arms to hold you tight,
And make the shooting, shouting, screaming cease.
A world of dreams that lives only at night.
A  home that never was, for which I grieve;
Perhaps some night, I'll dream and never leave...

Mick McKellar
April 2020

We all long for peace and warmth and love -- for a home to which we can return when the world beats us bloody and we need to feel safe. Some only know this in their dreams, and some leave us too soon to seek that solace.

Mick

Cracked Window

Rumbled, jumbled, ruined, and wracked,
My window on the world has cracked.
The fractures cause me to perceive,
Our home -- exhausted, I believe.

Trees are grey and air gone inky,
Our blue lake is green and stinky.
Nothing that grows is safe to eat,
And pavement buckles in the heat.

Food comes only as tasteless cubes,
Water only in plastic tubes,
And treadmills walked till late at night,
Provide the only source of light.

The air is thick with dust, a hot
Soup as likely to kill as not.
Those who work at the masters' tasks,
Are sometimes given safety masks.

The masters live in towers, high
Enough to reach the cold blue sky;
Or else they travel endlessly,
On yachts that ply the dying sea --

Consuming lives of countless poor,
The refuse of the teeming shore,
Until they, eventually,
Consume all of humanity.

Rumble, jumble, ruin, and wrack,
I fixed my window's massive crack;
But our time grows short, I perceive,
To fix the future, I believe.

Mick McKellar
April 2020

I overslept today, and found myself trapped in a dystopian dream reached through a looking glass that was badly cracked. This is my glimpse of a possible destination along our current path of unfettered consumption.

Mick

A Field of Flames

A field of flames shivers with tiny quakes.
Sparks suffocate and never grow older,
And the core of the Earth quivers and shakes,
As our brief fire, in passing, grows colder.
The bright human dance on this ancient globe,
Dims briefly, as vanishing points of light
Flash and demur in a cascading strobe,
Piercing the veil of encompassing night.
Though numbers are numbing, taken en mass --
No face, no voice, and therefore dismissed.
With each little spark a miracle passed;
A wonder, no longer touched, loved, or kissed.
The enormity of loss is measured,
Only when every flame is treasured.

Mick McKellar
April 2020

I remembered the sorrow I felt when a small bird flew into our window and broke its neck. A small spark of life extinguished in a moment and gone forever. Then I hear the death count from the pandemic and the enormity of those individual lives gone too soon overwhelmed me.

Mick