Wildfire Smoke, 2023

Today Pittsburgh is the place

my Irish ancestors knew 

when they got here to labor 

and never return to Co. Galway. 

The sun's a fiery desperate yolk 

in the viscous gray-white sky. 

The tall buildings downtown 

stand like ancient monuments 

made ghostly by the fog of time. 

What a shock it must have been 

for them to leave the endless 

rolling green and the silver-blue 

of the sea for "hell with the lid off." 

They did this dutifully, imagining 

a people going forward into the next 

& the next centuries, imagining how 

clean the air would be once we all 

had enough money, how blue the sky, 

how clear as god's own eyes the stars.