When It Finally Arrives

There is something in the wind.
Not salt or sea. Something else.
Something that does not belong.
Foreign, strangely smokey,
The smell of broken things
trying to find their way, lost things
trying to become new. Ashes
from lands we once thought far away,
suddenly feel imminently close.
Something strong and uncomfortable.

The seagrass blows in the wind.
Does it know? Is there some primordial memory
in the world around us that knows
just how close we are to an unraveling?
or a rebirth?

You breathe in the air. Perhaps it is your imagination,
a thing often darker than you like.
Perhaps it is the smell of birth,
which in your own life has smelled like conflagration
more than once,
fooling your nose and your sense of what is real.
It would not be the first time you smelled old soil
where new has been turned over.

You are no prophet,
Any wisdom you have does not extend that far.
God’s words are far too subtle for your surety.
You live in the now. Relentlessly so,
determined to make new mistakes, not the old ones.
There is less pressure in that. Less anxiety,
but often, when the wind changes,
far more uncertainty. A thing you live with,
more in wonder than fear, remembering
the unseen can be magical, white or black,
and often you choose which it is
when it finally arrives.

About this poem

Our world is changing. How? What will we make of it? Some days, my mind whirls. Other days, it is still as a summer day. I read too much news, I think.

Tom