Australia ~

BUSHFIRE WEATHER

It’s cool in the hills,
breezes dart through houses like trapped birds
beating glass until they’re free.
It’s clean up there. Smog doesn’t rain
across the garden, smudging the birds of paradise,
fingerprinting the windowsills.

It’s calm in the hills when the frenzied heat
in the town bullies pedestrians.
The north wind eggs it on:
cotton wrapped like a second skin
loosens and billows, even sunglasses can’t screen the grit,
the earth in the driveway’s blown off,
vegetables wilt in the garden,
the city lies down like an old dog.

In century heat, in the tinder-dry hills,
the air has an edge, too, but the shade is kinder.
Children swing across the Onkaparinga
into cool green slime. Cats pant under water tanks,
and horses munch prickly grass under rattling trees.

By one o’clock the city has a compress on its head,
no longer looks at the hills
as if they meant the afterlife.
The north-east wind dries sweat running down the spine,
belches out yellow clouds, pummelling cyclists,
rocks the lucky ones that are sheep trucked from the hills.
Down in the mall, the dogged buskers play
till a string snaps.