Tag Archives: Ozone layer

No Skin, For dVerse Poets, June 15, 2024: Fragment Poem

No Skin

As it grows hotter year by year,
then month by month,
we hide in our caves for protection,
for there is no skin to our world.
The aqua sky?
Gone, my friends,
Replaced by  fire.
The mountains are obscured by fire,
obscured again by smoke that still, alas,
is not a skin.
No skin.  No.  No skin left for our world.
No skin.
Our water boils in its pipes. No cool succor there.
We are all caught in the too-long day
That  fades into inevitable night.
We lie awake,
our minds throbbing to music from the drum of the moon
that leads us into dreams
where we forget the large lie and remember, finally, that
the sins of the heart are not just theater
but reflect the sins of mankind,
who for purses of gold
have sold our world.
Now we all cook in the pan of their greed,
the protective skin of our world
sold off year by year
for yachts and palaces that share
the same vanished sky of the houses
where we cower for protection from that once-benevolent sun
under which in the past we spread ourselves to receive those rays
now turned lethal in this skinless world.

 

For this dVerse Poets prompt, we were to write a new poem that included 13 lines from a famous poem or one of our own old unpublished poems. I based my poem on  these fragments from a poem I wrote years ago entitled “Evil World Scenario.”

No skin there.
The aqua sky?
Gone, my friends,
Replaced by  fire.
No skin.  No.  No skin left for our world.
No skin.
We are all caught in the too-long day
That  fades into inevitable night.
We lie awake,
Our minds throbbing to music from the drum of the moon
That leads us into dreams–
Where we forget the large lie and remember, finally, that
The sins of the heart are just theater.

 

To read other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.