Davin Faris

Days We Invent

Before the bombs fall, shrill as violins.
Before the hurricanes silence cities
or fire finds the harrowed forests.
Before the oceans rise like violent masses.
Before the tornadoes grasp our paper walls.
Before rivers run red and fields are salted
and death inhabits all our sacred halls
come sit with me a moment
by the still green hills.
Taste the somnolent smoke and the wind fleeing.
Close your eyes and feel the heat on your face.

Before we call loved ones or make demands of god
tell me each generation invents doomsday.
Say all children are born
before the specter of their cataclysm.
All times are end times.
I crave your catechisms of survival.
Tell me the blade over Damocles
is only a butter knife.
Tell me it isn’t over.

Tell me the thread snaps and nothing happens.
Lie beside me at the foot of the hills.

Before annihilation come harvest the rose hips
and if we are here tomorrow we will dry them
in scarlet rows across the window sill.
Dance our waltzes in the liquid amber spotlight
of a mushroom cloud or the cold lightning
of another unprecedented storm.
Insist you are not afraid.
Sing past the nettles stinging your lungs.
Swim with me through the last melting glacier.
Tell me stories of places you loved.
Forget what we have forgotten before.

Before displacement and disease.
Before famine and its intimate depravities.
Before the doomsdays we invent
in these times of ours alone.
Before we are alone.
Before our shrill bombs fall
lie by the still green hills with me.
Stay too late under a collapsing sky

and say look a shooting star.
Tell me to make a wish before we go.
Before it is time to go.

Cinderland

The sky
sings wildfire hymns to its children
who cough and fever.
Smoke renders red cities on the news
the haze of morning I named fog
before knowing flames
before the shy sky confessed
its bruises, like a child.
But then
last night
lightning bugs in revery
against the backwood
were perfect embers.
Long gone hours chasing
cupped hands and exclamation
and if the world was not a miracle
so stubborn in flourishing
maybe we’d cherish it
or change for it.

I forget the forest for fireflies.
If I were brave enough
for honest fear
I would rage like burning
earth, bloodied
sky.

ii.

What I mean is

if we are doomed

if we are damned

I would rather watch the tiger lilies

I would rather fight and cry

grin like June is endless

and leave my name

than see storms

with birds bound in oil

gather

with the soot-black snow

I cannot name

I cannot believe

all the wrong ways to die

in extinction or endings

but despairing is among them

yet none survive without despair

I would rather live

I would rather die

like the lilies.

with the birds.

iii.

So bones lie in grass
and vines grasp the laundry line.
We don’t look down
at tired bodies without a home
but ask
what’s the world coming to? Never
what have we done?
I have done
too little
and too much

and even the ocean
cannot drown our wildfires
or fill our thirst. And still
the red sky makes me smile
like a child, danger forgotten
as if I could catch and turn
dancing ashes
to lightning bugs.
The smoke carries
its memory of mountains
of green fields and raindrops
and greets us as death
and declares
even the end
perfect.

Davin Faris is a writer, climate justice organizer, and student at St John's College in Annapolis, MD. Davin's writing has been featured by The New York Times, Patagonia, In Vivo, and others.