Please join me in congratulating the Sept. contest winner. A new member named samary. here is her poem:
Amazon dispossessed (climate change)
Submitted by samary
The loud tonk tonk of the bell bird
sounds like a hammer hitting an anvil,
today it feels like a warning klaxon
rather than the obnoxiously loud call
of a male calling for a mate.

Distracted she climbs down from her perch
paces the floor, cocks her head to listen,
The vibrating hum of cicadas normally so soothing,
Have brought goosebumps to her skin made
her hackles rise.

The normal pattern of her day disrupted
something is lurking in the air,
which feels drier and tastes acrid,not foul but infused
with sulpher like the outer vestiges of hell.
She takes a deep breath trying to sift
through the aromas, the deep earthy tones, the mustiness of rotten vegetation, overlaid with something indefinable, imutable and worrying.

As the day creeps on padded feet towards full night, the forest always gloomy darkens,
Today everything is light and she sees
bright crimson and gold flashing through the canopy,
Brighter than the sun on a cloudless day, yet
striped with sulphorous black denser
than the moonless night.

She climbs a tree for a better view
On edge, she twists her head trying to focus
lookjng for threats,
Yet all she sees is light brighter than anything she has witnessed in her life.
Then silence other than the
cr
ack of branches a plop
splut of water ,
Sound seems to have been sucked into a vortex.

Instinctively she surveys her home ,
She knows in her heart this is the last time
she will view it, or climb this tree.
Silence instead of alarm calls from the canopy,
Danger is approaching and she will have to leave.
She coughs
deep and racking in her chest.

She has been alone since the departure
of her last child,
She will continue her solitary life but where
will she find a safe home?

She doesn't understand greed,
or the need to fire forrest to grow crops
or run cattle, nor that cattle are taboo
for the likes of her.
She doesn't understand that her forrest home
is the lungs of the world,
that destruction will damage her world
and its climate for all time.

She just knows her ancestral home is
a place of danger instinctively
she bounds down the tree
heads towards the river and a chance
of life on the other side.

Will she survive?
I wish I could forsee
See her
Tawny speckled hair ears erect as she
swims across the river,
tail standing like a flag.
Her life forever disrupted as her home
is consumed along with the worlds
at
mos
phere.