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