A day or two ago, my habit of listening to the BBC whenever I have a bout of early-morning insomnia brought to my ears an interview with fire historian Stephen Pyne. I have been living the event that was under discussion: the fires in Canada and the resulting smoky conditions in the northeastern US. In my 40+ years, the vast majority of them spent in New Jersey and our neighboring big cities, I’ve never experienced anything like this, and that brings a lot of dread.
Pyne was so evocative in his discussion of “the Fire Age” (as opposed to the Ice Age), that I wondered what poems I could find in his writing. So I did an erasure of his most recent post on his blog, using only the last five paragraphs. As usual when I do erasures, my impulse was to push away from the meaning of the original text. Though Pyne’s post gave me opportunities to use the first person singular, it felt right in this moment to skirt around that. Despite that, the poem does show the imprint of my personal instincts, and finds its way to a hopeful place. Though in the case of climate change, I’m not sure I actually feel optimistic. To be fair, this poem as an imaginative act will become its own thing apart from the more practical text and real-world conditions from which it sprang. While composing it, the early days of my daughter’s life came to mind, when it struck me that newborns are like a fierce fire burning away almost everything and clearing the ground for a new life.
What of the future of fire?
What an awakening brings.
Whatever it elects to voice,
presence to speak.
Hard to hold, grow in valence,
shared centrifugal.
To adopt a fire,
the perimeter will fracture
into the new.
The inherited fire.
We sparked:
imagine the dissolve.
Evolve, thrive
in the years to come.