Big fire, says the highway patrolman. 
And smoke has closed the freeway, 
so you can’t get on here. Just watch 
for signs heading east, wait to be 
shown where to turn again; follow 
the traffic into the horizonless gray. 

Smoke, and painted road, and once in 
awhile shape of a tree, a grain silo, 
but no horizon in any direction. I try 
turning south again and again but 
am turned back by orange cones, 
striped barriers flashing yellow lights 

and the traffic thins as the dark 
afternoon wears on without a sign 
except the orange sun appearing 
and disappearing in smoke curtains 
and the road going up and down hills, 
bending into turns, and finally the last 

car to follow turns back the way we came, 
but I keep on, looking for left turns south 
riding them until there’s only another 
right turn back to the east and more smoke 
and less to see, and I think the world may 
have ended without my knowing, or any 

of us knowing. So this is it I think, no ice, 
no fire, just blinding smoke and everyone 
lost but driving or walking or flying 
maybe until the fuel runs out and I think 
there’s a certain freedom here at the end 
because no matter what we do now, 

whether we were righteous or humble, 
cruel or kind, whether we loved the earth 
and every being on it, or we consumed 
and destroyed and burned and poisoned, 
the consequences are the same, smoke 
suffocating the just, and the unjust, all. 

—An earlier version of this poem appeared in the 30/30 Project at Tupelo Press (July 2024).

Thomas A. Thomas

was born in Illinois to a medical-doctor mother and a ballet-dancer father, and spent a lot of time off by himself in the woods, prairies, and fields, day and night, in all seasons. Thomas found his way to the University of Michigan (U.M.), where he studied with Donald Hall, and Gregory Orr, and workshopped some poems with Robert Bly. He won Minor and Major Hopwood Awards in Poetry, and his poem “Approaching Here” was choreographed and performed at U.M.

Thomas worked as Detroit Correspondent for a St. Louis-based Rock and Jazz magazine, Concert News, covering many of the major acts of the mid-1970s. After a couple of years of madness in New York City in the late Seventies, he camped his way west to Washington state, where he has happily made his home for more than 40 years. He now serves as a Board Member for the Olympia Poetry Network, and is active in numerous online poetry and photography groups.

His poems, photographs, and video recordings appear in print and online, most recently in The Banyan Review, Blue Heron Review, Cirque Journal, FemAsia Magazine, Gyroscope Review, and Vox Populi, as well as in English-language anthologies and in translation to Spanish, Serbian, and Bengali. In 2022, his work was nominated for Best of the Net and for the Pushcart Prize.

Thomas is the author of Getting Here (Trafford Publishing, 2005), a collection of poems and photography; and My Heart Is Not Asleep (MoonPath Press, 2024), poems that delicately reconstruct moments from a decade of caring for his wife, as she gradually succumbs to early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Poet’s website: https://thomas-a-thomas.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ On Being Astonished and Capturing the Sight in a Poem, an interview of Thomas A. Thomas by Karen Hugg (8 May 2019).

(Hugg, pronounced “hewg,” is a professional horticulturist and writer of literary mysteries and nonfiction articles about plants. Her most recent book, published in 2022, is Leaf Your Troubles Behind: How to Destress and Grow Happiness Through Plants.)