The fire

Everything we turn our hands to becomes tinder

for an imagination darker than we can comprehend.

We make a map of our thoughts,

spread it wide upon the unmowed grass,

weigh down its corners with odd pots and jars

half-filled with sunlight and laughter.

We plot a course among the stars,

and with our friends, bold astronomers of hope,

bend canvases of indescribable colour to a wind

that takes us anywhere and everywhere,

only to see our sails slacken, sag, melt, blister,

and yield to the breath of a strange and secret sun,

like cepia celluloid jammed in the projector gate

surrendering to a bulb whose bright heat is worse

than the darkness in the windowless picture house.

We are stranded alone in a mute and starless void.

Memory does not fade, it burns, with a hot rot

as senseless and stealthy as a melanoma

fuelled by the flesh it silently consumes

and everything eventually becomes tinder

for an imagination darker than we can comprehend

We have a choice: fear the fire that lights up our lives

and fills the darkness with twisting agonies of smoke;

or celebrate together the sky into which they billow,

a sky to which a pale moon lends her beauty

among cathedrals of cloud where we gather

in the moonlit ruins of our hope.

(This was written in response to the Glasgow Art School fire of 2014, witnessed from a window on Bath Street)