Stewart C Baker is an academic librarian and author of speculative fiction and poetry. His poetry has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Asimov's, and numerous haiku magazines, and he is the web editor for The Heron's Nest. Stewart was born in England, has lived in South Carolina, Japan, and Los Angeles, and now lives in Oregon with his family and a varying number of animals.
I came up with this haiku while driving through the hills of West Salem, Oregon in the early evening. West Salem is a very steep and hilly area, covered with trees and winding roads, and as the sun set I could see the lights of people's houses deeper in the hills poking through the trees. I remembered another drive in Portland, where the sunset reflected off glass windows in the distance, bright orange like fire, and the two images merged in my mind to emerge as this poem. Dragons, of course, are never far from my mind, and I find it interesting to think of them and their hoarding of gold and other precious items (also shiny, also hidden, gleaming through the trees) as a kind of sickness.
