AN UNDESIRABLE SILENCE

by Katy Z. Allen

I first noticed it early in the morning, isolated orange rays of light passing between the trees, the unusual color catching my eye, and so I went looking for the Sun, hidden from sight, and stopped abruptly when I saw it, not far above the horizon, a deep orange disc in the foggy, hazy, cloudy sky. Later, stepping outside for a second time, the light was so strange and eerie it gave me the shivers. I thought a storm was coming, maybe even a tornado, for the feel of the air was foreboding, so I checked all three weather apps on my phone, but none said anything about rain. The unease remained with me as I journeyed from errand to errand, wondering why I had heard nothing, although to be honest I hadn’t gone searching beyond my weather apps, but each time I stepped out of the car I felt that unease and when at last I arrived home and checked my email I saw a subject line, “The sky looks ominous and the air quality is bad. When will it end?” and that was when I learned—perhaps having had my head in the sand for longer than I should have—about the latest wildfires across Canada and Minnesota and the smoke from those fires arriving on our doorstep, so to speak, here in New England, and at last I understood, but all day I’d been feeling the silence of an explanation and only when it was so bad that everyone would notice did some brief and insufficient explanation arrive. I don’t have my head so far into the sand to be fully unaware that as long as we’re not seeing it, we’re not hearing it, we’re not experiencing it, the fact that the world is on fire is greeted with silence, even though it is a deep, dark  heaviness that breaks our hearts and weighs us down, no matter what the color of the Sun as it rises above the horizon in the morning.

Katy Z. Allen is a lover of the more-than-human world, poet, retired rabbi of an outdoor congregation, former healthcare chaplain, and co-founder of a Jewish climate organization. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in print and online in such places as The New Verse News, Amethyst Review, The Bluebird Word, Cosmic Daffodil, The Soliloquist Journal and Art on the Trails: Number 9. She was awarded Honorable Mention in The Prose Poem’s 2025 Prose Poetry Competition, and her book, A Tree of Life: A Story in Word, Image, and Text was published by Strong Voices Publishing. 

THE GRANITE STATE

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

Wildfire smoke from western Canada settles in the atmosphere in Franklin [New Hampshire] on Friday evening. Wildfires from western provinces of Canada brought smoke to the Northeast, where an air quality advisory last weekend included central and western Massachusetts, all of Vermont and northern New Hampshire. (Daniel Sarch/The Laconia Daily Sun photo August 19, 2024)

My Dad remembers 
Dust on snow in the 1930s
Drifted cross-continent from the Plains
 
But he doesn’t remember early 
Wildfire smoke from Canada
Locking the mountains in haze
 
Every summer now
Dimensionless white days
Hot-hued sunsets, red moons 
 
At 96, he sighs, resigned
We ignored the elements 
At our peril and now 
 
Air is visible, Water speaks in drowning tones
And Fire strips us down to Earth
Down to the granite state

 
Melanie Choukas-Bradley writes from New Hampshire, known as the “Granite State,” where the White Mountains are currently engulfed in Canadian wildfire smoke. This morning she asked her 96 year-old dad if he remembered wildfire smoke earlier in his lifetime. He replied: “No, but I do remember dust on the snow when I was a child during the Dust Bowl.” Melanie is a naturalist and award-winning author of eight nature books, including Wild Walking—A Guide to Forest Bathing Through the Seasons, City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, andFinding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island. She has had two previous poems published in the New Verse News and many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice, including four that have won “Moon Prizes.” Her poems have also been featured on nature-oriented websites.

I VOTED TODAY

by Kathy Conway

Walked wearily to the polling place at town hall
ignoring the peak foliage bursting color
in every direction on a fall day here in southern
New England.

I returned home on a street lush with trees -
maples, birches, elms, chestnuts, sumacs.
Windy yesterday yet warm and drizzling today,
I tread on a magic carpet of leafy shapes and colors.

Bright yellow birch leaves cover the sidewalk,
gradually changing to intense reds, then amber,
deep gold and rust.  I strolled wet-faced beneath trees
hanging heavily with colorful offerings.

Looking up, awed by a crimson Japanese Maple,
wet-black limbs foil to the beauty of its ruby red -
a canopy fit for a bride or a queen.  And I remembered that
change is the only constant; that this too shall pass.

The seasons come, go; heat and cold begetting
winter snow, spring green, summer blossoms, fall stipples.
Buoyed by the brilliance and brisk walk, I return hopeful that
my fellow Americans vote to effect change.

Kathy Conway splits her time between a cottage on the coast of Maine and her home outside of Boston. She's taught memoir poetry in Maine and Florida. Besides her chapbook Bacon Street about growing up in a large family, she has poems in themed collaborations.

I COULD HAVE BEEN IN NEW ENGLAND

by Linda Lerner

“The picturesque old town of Dachau invites one to linger and enjoy its many places of interest.” —Dachau.de

my father’s voice that I hadn’t heard
since he died interrupts a news report
about anti-Semitic crimes increasing
here, didn’t I warn you, he says
the smoke from 70-year-old explosions in Russia
rises up from bomb threats at Jewish centers now
and I’m fighting with him again to
stop living in the past, that’s over with,
I say, but as the newscaster
continues citing threats across
the country I begin marching
back to my college years protesting
discrimination against blacks
signing petitions against segregation
do it from the safety of my birthright;
there’s nothing to worry about, I tell him
it’s not us, it’s Muslims who have to worry
who need my help today…

outside the sun is shining; in the warm
winter light everything looks as it always has;
a friend is telling me about her trip to Germany
to where the death camps are now tourist sites;
as she walked around the city, went into shops
visited a park, watched children playing,
their parents looking on, relaxed,
said, I could have been in New England

Linda Lerner has new work in Onthebus, Chiron Review, Gargoyle, and SoFloPoJo. In spring 2015, she read six poems on WBAI for Arts Express. Her recent collections include Yes, the Ducks Were Real and Takes Guts and Years Sometimes (NYQ Books) and a chapbook of poems inspired by nursery rhymes Ding Dong the Bell Pussy in the Well.