Fire - Sept 13 2020

Fire

Sept 13 2020

We close around the fire.

Bask

in its warm inviting glow.

It holds our eyes,

flickering flames

reflect in glistening whites,

faces flush

with infernal light.

We huddle, shuffle, bunch

as a breeze picks up

and the circle turns ragged;

a funnel of smoke

is stubbornly hugging the ground,

red-hot cinders

and superheated ash

shift this way and that

with maddening inconstancy.

We face away

from the cold black night.

It feels like a weight

against our backs;

a stalking cat

crouching in darkness

intently biding its time.

We stare, as if hypnotized,

piling on fuel

feeding the pyre.

Something unnatural

bred in the bone, and ancient in blood

has us enthralled,

servants of flame

disciples of fire.

I was looking back over some of my recent pieces, and Water inspired me to elaborate on the elements; or at least the elements as understood in the ancient worldview of creation. I also thought back to the Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta's acclaimed trilogy -- Fire, Water, Earth.

It's also the time of year for warm cozy fires and gathering around: when the leaves are turning, a crisp chill is in the air, and night – like a pincer movement of hostile forces – is steadily creeping in on daylight from both ends.

I was also listening to a repeat episode of the BBC radio's Crowd Science, in which the topic was fire: why we cook our food, and what advantage we get from this; as well as how and when man learned not only to use fire but to control it. The importance of fire to our biological and cultural evolution is remarkable, and how this may go back as much as 2 million years to our proto-human ancestors suggests why this unnatural thing seems so natural to us. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3csz1sv)

There are also vast uncontrolled wildfires raging in the Western US – California, Oregon, and Washington. (Yes, as I've feared for years, one of the incipient positive-feedback tipping point of runaway climate change. This is only the start!)

So fire is essential destructive, and enthralling. We control it, and we don't. We feed it ...and it consumes us, as well.

The final stanza initially began with ...piling on fuel / feeding the fire. But I was reluctant to repeat fire. (I suspect I'm overly sensitive to repetition that readers never notice.) “Blaze” works; but it lacks both the alliteration and the rhyme (with hypnotized), and so interrupts the flow. Pyre conveniently restores some of this. And because of its funereal connotation also seems a little unexpected, and so arrests the reader for a moment. Which, I think, may be helpful: sandwiched-in between the predatory cat and the compulsive zeal of servants and disciples, it reinforces the vaguely sinister tone; a tone that began with infernal, and continued with the smoke and cinders.