Their Houses Set on Fire
Dec 12 2010


The science of fire
is simple —
oxygen, fuel, ignition.

It’s the art of fire
I’ve been missing.
How to catch lightning
before it strikes the earth.
How to pull away
from hypnotic flame.
How to feed
its inexhaustible appetite,
without consigning myself to the blaze.
Because it’s either incinerate
or burn slowly,
decomposing
in warm fertile soil.

Not every circle of Hell
is white hot, molten.
There is the Hell we make
right here.
Scorched earth,
diabolical air.
The acid sea,
that will strip you of your outer shell
reduce bone
to nothing.

The fields of the vanquished
were sown with salt,
their women taken as slaves.
And their houses set on fire,
the men who remained
left inside.
So for years
the smell of burning flesh
clung to the place.
Teeth, and fragments of bone,
sifted from cooling ash
disgorged from fertile ground.

Grass, succeeded
by saplings, and trees,
a dark dank forest.
Until lightning strikes.
Or a match
accidentally tossed
into tinder.


An environmental poem about the perfidy of man; the creative destruction of fire; and the regenerative cycles of nature.

There is lots going on here, and probably lots I don’t know about. It was a kind of stream of consciousness thing, on a freezing day when I made a roaring fire: a day when my mood was darkened by the black dogs of futility and despair. Which probably explains a lot!