pictures from the future

The picture is this week's Magpie Tales prompt.

I switched my printer on this morning
and it chuntered out
a stream of images
sent back from the future
by processes as yet not understood.

They show the Earth as striped
with bands of heat and cold,
the sky is likewise barred
with streaks of black and gold.
These are not merely tints
but particles.
Sky, air, cloud: all that we know
as insubstantial,
bodiless
seem concrete to the core.

Stripes cut across
the furnishings of landscape:
trees are slashed with ice,
long icicles and fire;
the dance of flames on flowers
most grabs the eye;
then as flames die
the flowers return and then are burnt again.
Meanwhile,
ice bands are thick with "mushrooms",
fungi large as juggernauts
that last a moment then are gone,
reduced to smoke dots
before they drift away.

The bands move on,
almost impalpably,
as if controlled
by ghostly clockwork.
Tick-tock, tick-tock
fire into ice
ice into fire.

Small animals
have grown the signs
and attributes
that once were those
of trees and plants.
A dog has leaves
instead of fur;
a cat is bundled
in white twigs, has
buds for eyes and
bark upon its back.

Winged elephants
like startled geese
take off in clouds
of scattered dust like water
from webbed feet (They're startled,
don't you see,
by too much urban sprawl,
the creep of factories and cooling towers:
it's that has driven them
to grow their wings,
evolve - along with all life forms -
a conscious evolution.)
to scoot bare
inches from the ground.


No plane can fly
those metal skies,
no sun peer through
nor birds take wing,
it is a shutter
on the earth, as
if we're riding
out some massive storm,
some climate change.
(Could that be so?)