Wild Fires
Tell those trees in Saskatchewan, seed-born
from a raven’s beak in the right kind of weather at some point
in the roaring ‘20s when Model T’s reigned the roads
and people said baloney and bees knees,
the real McCoy. The Great Gatsby.
The days of flappers and strikes and Calvin Coolidge.
A world where women just earned the right to vote
and there existed separate drinking fountains
for blacks and whites down south. Imagine.
Tell them when lightning strikes their ashes will scatter across
wavelengths of light in the upper atmosphere and turn the sun
a red hue. Give peach to the moon. That its smoke will rise
1600 miles from the forgotten bones of ravens to
where a woman in love will be pulling weeds bare-handed
and squint in the broth-like haze in wonder. Tell
the white spruce and black, the jack pine, the birch and fir,
tell the trembling aspen that their reach is not wide.
Some hundred years, some thousand miles to rest in,
some heads full of wonder for what is at some point.
Tell yourself how every blessed thing can matter.
Casey Lord has published poems in The Minnesota River Review, Midwest Quarterly, Red Rock Review, Harpur Palate, and White Pelican Review. She currently lives on a small urban farm in Iowa with her future husband and three kids, a dog, and seven chickens.