Fire Breathing

Victoria, 2019-2020: Devastating wildfires blaze across southeastern Australia as a result of a prolonged heat wave and drought created by climate change

Birds dropping out of the sky: burning, and dropping out of the sky. Stars gone, sun gone, nothing but thick darkness and fear: ghosts wander dangerously in the smoke.

Dread has its own clarity, its own sharp edges- no one is the same having felt it. Too late to leave, roads closed, flights cut off, people huddled together close to water. The wind is about to shift.

Salvation is a crop duster, a tanker truck, an island. Escape no longer somewhere out there but only anywhere the flames cannot go. Hands blindly grasping, voices murmuring prayers, then

lightning flashing, bursts of brightness: lighting but with no storm, fire-generated, a singular thing, it crackles. By morning, Mallacoota has no power under skies as black and dark as midnight;

by noon, fire trucks form rings around those trapped to protect them from flames coming closer and faster. Told to go into the water, any water if the sirens wail a warning. Most people will never know

how loud a fire is. It howls and screams, a voice almost human. Some say it sounds like a freight train; others, the voice of a dragon, the sound of a world-ending in pain. Piercing strobes of flashing lights

from emergency vehicles glitter-reflecting houses in ruins, ashes of past lifetimes gone should anyone be left here to mourn over them: a garden, a wall, a shop, burning, leaving no more time to even dream

of what might be, too late for finding love, or learning a new language, or following a vision cherished back when sweet sunset days drifted into starry nights and life was nothing but promise. Promises burn.

Visions burn. People burn. A heating world made manifest in a desperate fire-breathing earth, in wild bushfires that devour everything, and one day we’ll look back and say we never took the time xxxx. to say goodbye to the koalas.