A Call to Cleaner Airs: a poem

A Call for Cleaner Air:

Can the gulls see the air?
Can they taste their element, can they perceive what man cannot?
Do they skirt the smoggy winds, turn back their wings from polluted things;
decadence, decay and rot?

Do they in their haunting cries,
report and beckon, review or surmise,
what path through the air is purest, or the cleanest of the lot?

And we, who stand too heavy to fly-
watching them wheel in their gaseous sky,
can we hearken to their instructive cries,
and find what the Ancients sought?

Dare we on our dusty pyramids,
reach desperately from our peaks of thought,
and try to grasp the cleaner air; bind it as a selling fare,
to be parceled, weighed and bought?

Will eyes watering from smoky streets open in surprise,
if they see the untainted goods we pulled down from the skies?
Will hands long numbed for a heartless thing
stretch to receive the caresses they bring,
and feel at last with ecstasy, the air that on free things fly?

Can we meet a sickened soul, hear his rattling, damaged breath,
and with the gift of our cleaner air, restore his heart to health?
Can we blow the smoke away, from the mirrored room of our world,
and stretch out at last a snapping flag, a message bold, unfurled?

I do not know.
Maybe the gulls see nothing, perhaps only through survival they fly,
perhaps the cleaner air is an illusion, a fairy tale, a lie...
Come with me, let us venture, let us cure the world with the sky;
we have only one way of knowing for sure, and that way is to try.