Jailbreak of Sorrows (“I Had Me A Wife, I Had Me Some Daughters”)

Massive heat dome come
Down on me — I’ve run myself
Ragged — nobody knows
What I’ve done to my family.

As the Fata Morganas shimmered away —
I dug a hole as big as could be
Dropped them in, one by one,
In the dark maw of atavistic iniquity.

Released to the night crawlers —
Oh, Lord, please, let them take root
By the leprous shagbark hickory —
I did unto them as they unto me.

In the dead of the morning
When the tree towers above me
I’m gonna hang myself on that gnarled branch
Of the family tree.

What I’m Reading:

Firefighters in Oregon and now France are battling wildfires big enough to generate spectacular, dangerous pyrocumulonimbus clouds (pyroCbs) — huge storm clouds that form in the hot updraft of big fires, generate wind and lightning, and exacerbate dangerous conditions. These fire storms also loft smoke into the stratosphere, where it can spread more readily around the globe, eat away at Earth’s protective ozone layer and influence weather and climate. That’s why scientists have just launched an airborne mission to observe these rare storms like never before, using a specially modified jet and a high-altitude NASA plane.

— Flora Graham / “Fire-chasers take to the sky” / Nature Briefing