NOVA SCOTIA WILDFIRES 2023

Must beauty always come with pain?
Not even Mother Earth is spared.
As the French say “il faut souffrir pour être belle”
“one must suffer to be beautiful”.

New York meteorologists report
that in the month of the Strawberry Moon
winds may blow south from Canada’s blaze.
The paradoxical result could be
extraordinary sunsets
born of the poisonous haze.

The death of a forest combines with the end of a day.
A terrible funeral pyre from which smoke chokes the air.
Yet Nature rises like the Phoenix,
her arms temporarily buoying the sinking Sun,
Who takes a deep, brave, gasping breath,
exhaling one last crimson burst,
creating, in the wounded clouds,
a blood red sky too awesome to bear.