Scarred and Blackened

Scarred and Blackened In Tasmania’s rugged but scenic South West Lies an ancient land of pristine wilderness Protected by a World Heritage Listing An eco-system a thousand years nesting A land of Aboriginal spiritual dreamtime Where rare native flora survives, like Pencil Pine And fauna abound on the Button Grass plains With rugged mountain ranges never tamed Hunter Gatherers burned to reduce the fuel load The protectors now heading down the wrong road By letting the fuel build to immense dimensions A massive fire just waiting to turn the land ashen The spirit of storm clouds gathers up high For the rangers this is pleasing to the eye But alas, this building spiral of cloud is dry Just building thunder heads in the sky The inner circle of the clouds one big mass Intermingle, then with violence they clash Spewing bolts of lightning to the ground But not a drop of precious rain to be found A searing bolt of lightning grounds Amid the drought-stricken pencil pines An explosion of sparks, then flames A fire is born the lightening to blame Spreading quickly with the brisk westerly winds The fire races through the dry Button grass plains A massive cloud of smoke drifts east Alerting the protectors to this massive beast The call goes out for fire fighters and water bombers As the black smoke causes concern to near-by loggers For the fire now a catastrophic inferno Consuming the wilderness like no tomorrow The water bombers and man-power useless Against this cataclysm of wild fire that has unleashed Thousands of acres of pristine wilderness Now blackened and scared, a nothingness For weeks it burned, some 100,000 acres Now tamed by remote area fire-fighters But the scars from the fire yet to discover A landscape that will take years to recover Global warming, to blame many think As this South-West area was always wet Many years of below average rainfall Perhaps Mother-Nature having her revenge