The icebergs—did you see them, before?

Great rambling beasts of the Southern Ocean

White, or the faded blue of memory

Broken but whole, inanimate and alive

Taking from us, as they approached

Our breath, our warmth, our words

Now, mere wave-broken pools of melt

 

Next, emptying out the world, everything

Needful of the space we have filled

Elephants, eagles, wolves, whales

And also the small, requiring things

To be just so, intricacy of this bee, that flower

The curving tongue, the perfumed throat

Doomed by their entangled perfection

​

We came to accept all that, and yes

We struggle to remember the time before

The storms, and the skeleton reefs

Droughts, floods, crumbling shores

Spreading deserts, absent glaciers

The burning forests, the sinuous rivers

Working their way through the city streets

 

Yet, still somehow, we never dreamed

The clouds themselves, reliable as mountains

Could be added to the roster of extinction

That we would live beneath an empty sky

That between us and the burning sun

Would remain only a merciless nothing

An atmosphere exhaled by us alone

Cloud Elegy

© Pepper Trail