There’s no such thing as a controlled burn. When tinder of dried grasses sacrifice themselves to taunting, tactile flame and hell advances, rolling, vampiric combustion after delicacy of first blood. Destruction served up with a golden patina of nature caveman ancestors and horses would scurry away, this gift of warmth taken too far. The renewal flicker that returns the elements to ashen form, dust-to-dust reminding that the strongest, oldest oak is simply water, fuel, and chemicals. There’s a beauty to the pyrotechnic choreography annihilation of the woody masses. Here I stand, rooted, once hopeful once a sapling self, dreaming of becoming something towering. To challenge whales in grandeur— the largest living organism. But as the orange-tinged lightning creeps across my lawn, and up onto my bark-ed skin I know for sure there’s no such thing as a controlled burn
Derek R. Smith (he/him) is a public health professional, Anishinaabe two-spirit, uncle, partner, sibling, friend, who finds it hard to not write poetry. He has recent publications in Great Lakes Review, ¡Pa’lante!, euphony, and Ignatian Literary Magazine. There is no space for distance here, in poetry, and isn’t that a beautiful thing?
