The sky is burning
May. 22nd, 2007 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonI didn't just smell it when I woke up this morning, I could actually taste it lingering on my eyeballs. That unique acrid stink you get when an old house has just burnt down. I quickly noticed the light from the windows were all wrong. The first golden splashes of dawn were absent from the room. Instead a film of mist clung to the window panes and offered only a gray luminescence that slowly dripped from the walls. I checked the clock. It was a quarter after six. It should be brighter than this. I threw on the radio and eventually heard about how the wildfires in South Georgia were drifting all the way up here in the metro Atlanta area.
I stood at the MLK Station peering through the spaces between the platform walls. The sun burned stange through the approaching ash-mist, a slow motion fireball crawling across the horizon on it's belly and dragging the hesitant morning behind it. The skyline itself was blurred into a series of vague chess pieces. Only the glass buildings, whose surface glowed with a bright blood orange along with the windows of the older buildings who sparked and flared intermitently. It was as if the entire city was attempting to communicate through the fog with a series of handheld mirrors.
A dance of light across vertical waters.
I found myself suddently remembering those quiet sunrises along the Mediterranean. I would stand on the bow on my ship sneaking in a quick smoke before work, casting out a net of vision towards the distant ports and waking cities. The wind would come down across the land and carry into the ocean the songs of prayer from Izmir, now humbled by the waves chorus into a respectful whisper. It would carry the first rumblings of rush hour commutes off Haifa. It bought the faint engine hums from the fishingboats of Mykonsos and the faint laughter of her crews. The hint of spices whose scent miraculously survived the journey from the little cafes opening up in Rhodes to all the way out here on an anchored American warship. I felt the humility of the most devout pilgrim even as my pride swelled with being the epic hero of a story I had yet to write. I had caught a glimpse of the true measure of the world then and within it the boundless distance this life was vesseled in.
I stood at the MLK Station peering through the spaces between the platform walls. The sun burned stange through the approaching ash-mist, a slow motion fireball crawling across the horizon on it's belly and dragging the hesitant morning behind it. The skyline itself was blurred into a series of vague chess pieces. Only the glass buildings, whose surface glowed with a bright blood orange along with the windows of the older buildings who sparked and flared intermitently. It was as if the entire city was attempting to communicate through the fog with a series of handheld mirrors.
A dance of light across vertical waters.
I found myself suddently remembering those quiet sunrises along the Mediterranean. I would stand on the bow on my ship sneaking in a quick smoke before work, casting out a net of vision towards the distant ports and waking cities. The wind would come down across the land and carry into the ocean the songs of prayer from Izmir, now humbled by the waves chorus into a respectful whisper. It would carry the first rumblings of rush hour commutes off Haifa. It bought the faint engine hums from the fishingboats of Mykonsos and the faint laughter of her crews. The hint of spices whose scent miraculously survived the journey from the little cafes opening up in Rhodes to all the way out here on an anchored American warship. I felt the humility of the most devout pilgrim even as my pride swelled with being the epic hero of a story I had yet to write. I had caught a glimpse of the true measure of the world then and within it the boundless distance this life was vesseled in.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Beautiful rendering
on 2007-05-22 05:07 pm (UTC)Re: Beautiful rendering
on 2007-05-22 06:11 pm (UTC)(as i try to post this for a fifth time...)
on 2007-05-22 05:15 pm (UTC)Re: (as i try to post this for a fifth time...)
on 2007-05-22 06:09 pm (UTC)