After the Earth Burned

Two crows sit in bare-branched trees, silhouetted black against a smoke-gray sky, one calling, Uh oh, the other responding, Uh oh. Above them glides a hawk, thrusting his wings, his being, against the winds that enabled the flames of destruction, a predator nonpareil, but there is no prey. Below them cockroaches scuttle among the remains of a campfire of humans gone long ago fleeing the fires and floods, a fluffy white dog, now black with soot, circling its perimeter, a prized family pet now one of its lupine ancestors. Farther away the beaches of precious resorts are lined with fishkill, the sea having taken them, as it rose and swirled, offering back its contaminants to those who killed it, while among the collapsed dunes lies the rubble of oceanside manses, the sum of humanity’s striving. Deeper in the trees, far away from the gaze of hawks, the pronouncements of crows, the metronomic slosh of the waves, two humans lie on the forest floor, barely skeletal creatures, making passionate love. Is it preservation of the species or simply lust? They neither know nor care what or why they do, which is what brought them to this point in the beginning, or end.