The Cleansing

It is as if the fire had burned everything My transition back to where I began Before I became an ordinary man Before memories were made, and all my life Became a museum of a past I could not hold What there was to show The way the fire consumes dry grass So everything I carefully stored in trust Was rotted with water from melted ice Mildewed and bagged by people nice Of bread I did not even save the crust Almost naked Almost fortuneless Almost forsaken I felt my root bite into blanched earth And fiber by fiber fed new birth It was hard finding of old ways here A sudden desolateness almost caused despair But the root had something vital in it A drive, a determination, a belief In God that the fire could not bring to grief So shorn of every memory like mowed grass Dusted further by a sudden drought So desolate that nothing again can sprout I without the bagage of the past am clean Severed from satellites and star sheen.