I Am Heat Too

• Haley Webster, Grade 12
• Poetry
• 2020

I walk along the street and know not what to think. It feels like an apocalypse and we have reached the brink.

The sun itself appears possessed and haunts with fading light. The dust around it refracts the shades of pink and peach and white.

I feel the earth around me, holding a breath of faith. A breath that needs to last us; are we to sink or swim?

The sun a wound within the sky, symbolic of our dying chance. We try so hard and achieve so little, opening doors we cannot close.

The river beside me blushes as it reflects the sky above. And although it flows and ripples, it now seems only mud.

I look behind me along the bank and see a smoggy sight. Of draught and dust and fire; a landscape as dead as night.

So tell me this, why do I feel that I am in Dubai? We have reached that heat, that peak, that edge; a world with too much life.

And as the sun sinks over this bareness, I think what can I do? I am but a small part in this, but then again, I am heat too.