POETRY

Green Chapels

In a toxic sky

Hazy View ©Paula Lechten

We can’t leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don’t regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer. Naomi Klein

The current administration continues to roll back regulations and protections for endangered species and has opened critical habitat to logging and mining.

A colorless blank sky looms overhead. Trees melt into a gray toxic haze.

I climb the hill so I can see the hawk soaring in the blue above the haze.

I walk deep into the woods, leaving behind the horns and heat,

the shimmering asphalt, the air that is thick and heavy;

the earth that crackles beneath the burning sky.

The woods receive me softly, the air is green and light.

My body empties of alarms.

I stop beneath the shady heart of trees to catch my breath. Shade gathers at my shoulders like a hand laid in kindness.

I breathe in the scent of fern and pine.

A gentler world grows further away every year. I lean on my walking stick, gasping for air.

This year I think I’m getting too old.

I climb the hill and see the gray following me up the slope.

Stumps stand like broken promises, an owl’s nest lies empty in a hollow; a monarch searches for milkweed.

Sunlight falls hard and bare.

Soon, silence will wrap me in its soft quilt—

And I will dream of butterflies and cool green chapels breathing in the wind.

Monarch on Coneflower ©Paula Lechten

Author’s Note: If you enjoyed this, please clap and read the following:

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