A bossa nova played and she perched a cigarette between her lips.

“Give me fire,” she said.

His cafezinho stood cooling on the starched white table cloth as he held his lighter to her cigarette, and then his own.

“Give me fire,” he repeated, smiling provocatively.

As he drank his cafezinho, he leaned his cigarette on the edge of an ashtray so that a single string of smoke danced toward the sky. But it was all in vain because the sky was gone.

The tree tops crackled, each leaf a cremated soul that fell to the ground and turned the red earth grey. 
Never again became again and again.

Less defacation will solve it. Children will solve it. Lighting another cigarette will solve it. Even a bossa nova might solve it.

Give me truth, not fire.

On the burning of the Amazon, a symbol of our conscience with the other forests of the world, in the beloved land of my birth.

Animals again, as we stood in packs and tended the hungry mouths and tired cries of our young.

Animals again, as we moved with purpose in fate’s sure hands.

Animals again, hunting in the shops and shelves of our survival.

Animals again, as we preened one another, purred and huddled together.

Animals again, as Gaia reminds us that we are one of many kinds.

Animals, biding our time to be claimed by the soil and the sea on this lonely planet of life, again.

On standing in the security lines at one airport or another. 

My hunt for the drugstore on the fringes of New York began at my inn with a request for a cup of tea which was unavailable because breakfast was closed and therefore I walked in the sweltering heat of a climate changed August ten minutes to Main Street where I stood at a traffic light waiting for the roaring SUVs with tinted back windows to protect the toddlers in richly padded child seats to stop and let me pass and eventually crossed the road into a town of organic cottons, love plants, and seared tofu where wholesomeness prevails and immigrants do the lawn-preening and landscaping and create the look of the nation though the President doesn’t want to look at them and a mother explains to her child with the melting ice cream that she cannot have sweets and presents right now only for her birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas but I still could not find the drugstore where I wanted to buy a kettle and some tea bags so I would be independent of Starbucks and then a nice lady looked at me sympathetically because I did not have a roaring SUV and said the drugstore is very far away over there at the deserted train station but good luck and finally I entered those doors under a sign that said Walgreens where I found my kettle and tea but where all the food is disorganized because everyone starves on takeaway and the lines for picking up prescriptions are long and I cannot find a cash register with no one who needs drugs and I see the media persecuted face of a child of a famous person on the cover of a magazine next to another magazine about climate leaders including Greta who is sailing over here and I wondered what she would think about ending up on someone's coffee table unread but finally I reached the cash register and the employee pointed her nylon nails at a sign saying that plastic bags were banned this August which lifted my spirits mildly and on the way home I learned this town was founded by shoemakers but now no one really needs sturdy shoes because no one walks that much except sometimes the immigrants and black people and a tourist who needs a kettle and some tea because breakfast at her inn was closed.

On visiting the outskirts of New York this August.