Ash Wednesday Fire
A pleasant cool settles
the ground flecked
by sunlight drizzling down
through a tall canopy
of trees. A slight wind
tickles the top leaves
with whispers.
All seems idyllic.
Yet forty years ago
on a Wednesday,
fire blasted the bush here
with a wall of furnace heat.
A blackened wasteland
was all that was left
leaving seventy-five lives
lost in its wake.
The bush never
counts the dead
nor records their names.
For it, there is only
blind obedience to life.
Eons have passed
with countless fires
scarred into the length
of its long history.
The land here is primal,
beyond our time, evolved
to bathe in cinders
and seed the future
in showers of flame.
Buffeted by hot, dry winds
and relentless heat,
its beauty becomes
an incendiary bomb
waiting to be lit.
But it harbors
no intentional ill
as it cycles through
its ancient playbook
of burn and renewal.
Our ways don't fit well
with such elementary
forces. As tenants, death
is sometimes the tragic
price we pay as rent,
the interest accrued
on love.
Nothing is meant to be,
but twenty six years later,
it claimed a further
one hundred
and seventy three.
They all have names
and leave families
with scars notched
into our history.
Copyright © Paul Willason | Year Posted 2023
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