One Day, My Child, All This Will Be Yours

Put out the fire across the ocean.
—ZEN KOAN

NORTHERN W INTER

Gathered at the thistle seed finches say, “We’ll be your winter flowers.”

Meanwhile, in New South Wales, a common magpie has learned the song of the ever-present fire engine sirens. She has captured the rise and fall and the urgency—the mixture of alarm, despair, and hope. It’s her only comment on the Australian fires, or the only comment we understand. She’s doing what she can.

I’ve been thinking about the old forests of South Queensland and Northern New South Wales since they’ve been burning. They are remnants of a far-distant time when Australia and Antarctica were joined in the supercontinent of Gondwana. Trees found as fossils in Antarctica, live on in Australia, often at a slight elevation on the eroded spurs of ancient volcanoes. Those zones are unlike anything else on the continent. Some of the trees are themselves ancient beings, birches several thousand years old, their great root structures covered with moss, epiphytes, and ferns; multiple boles rise out of them.

I became close