Sparrows Fall

I asked her if she remembered when Oklahoma came to Connecticut, dust covering the sun, leaving the grasslands’ parched thirst on windows, roads and snapping sheets.

She did not, though it was front page news: millions of tons of topsoil storming, millions of dollars of fertilizer wind-stolen from bare fields, small birds flung back to earth.

It happened again, and again, until drought ended in 1939.

It may have been unremarkable to a five-year-old.

She might have thought the yellow curtain was a foggy haze, the shore moved inland for the day, with dust so fine it would not settle until complete calm.

She did not recall the smell or taste, but this past summer, when wildfires brought a damaged transparency to the sky, when the sun was a wild penny quavering, my tongue understood.

This is the bite a child could overlook.

After the sky returned transparent, the scent hung in the under place: steep ravines and hollowed cliffs.

It lingered at the riverbank.

Like taste of some dead living thing, it seemed to bite back through the beautiful sunsets, the deep textured sky.

I am hollowed hard with memories of what we ignored, gone bees, migrations confused, the earth upended, moving where it does not belong.

This was the second summer of fires, big as nations, the planet prying bodies alert.

To remember, to not forget, to not be a child, distracted by crayons at a table.