I am compelled to write about Mount St. Helens
Even though I sit here in Texas, in the fever of clear blue air,
Too far away to know how. I cannot write about her fitful sleep,
Restless with nightmares whose boundaries novaed,
Dropping down upon her residents with the roar of tearing earth;
How it must feel to wade into volcanic smog too thick to breathe:
Everyone masked like aliens in a foreign atmosphere;
How geologists fly over and awe at her throbbing red heart as it emerges.
(They have been praying secretly to her slow-rising lava dome.)
I do not know these things on my skin, on my eyelids, fingertips.
My tongue has not scorched dry from the constant taste of ash.
I do not know what it is like to use firmly planted feet upon the ground
As an extension of the ears - those tiny percussion bones tuned too high
For the deep rumble of earth.
But I know, I feel certain in the pulse of images
I have received from the wires, the radio waves of news:
Up there on the mountain, a poet
Bruised by the crush of rock cascades,
Suffocating in the noxious air,
Sprinting in erratic panic through the burning-bush maze,
Perhaps cramped with other survivors in temporary shelters,
Finds scraps of paper to write his poems on.
And if he does not make it to safety,
Well, this is just to ask all those who search for bodies up there,
Whether it be months from now when all the ash
Is rained out of the clouds, and quakes have ceased,
And you find some half-rotted remains cemented in mudflow -
Check the pockets. Please, check the pockets..
Lillian Susan Thomas
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/burning-mountain/
