I.
We were grave robbers,
disinterring the dead of all past ages,
things that drew their last breath
long before we drew our first,
splintering flat black strata
where ancient forests once lay down,
siphoning ancient darkened sunlight
from the veins of the dead,
where it had congealed and pooled,
clogging subterranean arteries.
Our hearths were their pyres,
where we cremated geology,
in whose heat and light
we raised forty thousand generations,
taught them to stand up straight and walk,
inducted them into the ways of fire and thread,
the knap of flint, the hunt, the toil and trade,
inducted them into the age of fire.
II.
We were grave robbers and we were orphans.
We were orphans of the age of fire,
abandoned by the Earth, so we were told,
even while we mounted her breasts like gluttonous infants,
even while we flattened and augmented our hands,
to make shovels with which to delve and burrow
through the folds of her moist black flesh
tumbling over us in dark cascades of abundance,
yielding to our ploughs where we pulled them,
and offering us bouquets of wild flowers where fallow.
III.
We were orphans, abandoned by the Earth,
so we were told,
so that her gifts to us would seem like theft,
something taken, not given,
a lie to legitimise all subsequent cupidity,
and we invented scarcity in a world of plenty,
controlling access to abundance,
to create imaginary advantages
from which to conjure the rights and privileges of kings.
We didn't see her.
We didn't know she was there,
even though she stood right in front of us.
We imagined ourselves to be orphans
even while our mother kissed our forehead
with gentle dawn mists rising in the morning
and beams of moonlight glimpsed through clouds at night,
which we could not see
because our minds were filled with smoke and fire.
IV.
Our fathers said we fell from the sky.
We are the sons of gods. We are those golden sprues
that snapped off the Sun's crown and fell to Earth.
They said we are all stardust.
Our fathers' faith forgot the mother
who swept that dust into a heap
and brought the rain that made the mud
from which we were formed.
Even her memory was demonised:
Lilith, Leviathan, Lamia, Echidna, Tiamat,
Medusa, harpy, banshee, succubus, siren.
We lost all sense of legitimacy,
and lived as exiled bastards, wandering nomads,
even while we rested in her embrace.
Our thrones, that she had prepared and sanctified,
that anyone who knows her can occupy,
stood empty and abandoned
and overgrown among the roots and limbs
of the sacred groves we now cut down
to feed the fire.
V.
The sacred precinct was overthrown and the fire was refined.
Its uses extended beyond the heat and light of the campfire.
It became a beacon, a torch,
a mighty Pharos raised to guide ships to harbour
across tumultuous seas raised against us.
Eventually the light of that beacon fell across the mind,
and all that was understood was seen in that light,
and comprehended in terms of the commerce it enabled,
and the fire was honed until it became hot
and narrow enough to cut through metal,
great metal sheets with which we clad the ships of our mind
as they traversed new realms of knowledge,
welded fast and watertight.
The electricity and magnetism of Faraday in the hands of Maxwell
described the light at last,
a gospel interpreted and preached by Heaviside
until Einstein took it from him to make light itself the hinge
on which swing time and space
with the weightless cosmic telegraphy
that carries the whisper of time from place to place.
VI.
We were orphans and we drank, not milk, but fire.
We hauled slick black cables of coagulated blood
from the ancient arteries of the earth
and boiled it in our towers to restore it to life
- at least, that one single aspect of its former life
that we can use: it burns.
We burn clotted scabs and crusts of coal,
and a million years of fire ensues
over the forty thousand generations of our species
adrift and alone in our metal ark upon a sea of fire.
VII.
We burned effigies of the mother
we were told had died and abandoned us
with the mortality we inflicted on her fruit.
We attributed the fate of what we had killed
to the mother that had made us
to exculpate ourselves of its murder.
We punished her for that death
with which we believed she had abandoned us.
We called her harlot. We called her witch.
The tenderness of her incantations
was lost on those who did not see the world
the way her serenades described it,
for whom the life she celebrates
is a skeleton circus of the imagination.
We explored her with all the intricate contrivances of torture,
telling ourselves the atrocity was autopsy,
telling ourselves we were motivated by science, not selfishness.
We dismissed her screams as the residual reflex of a corpse.
We performed every unwitting violation
and the world turned sour as it stood.
VIII.
We cursed our thwarted appetites even amid plenty,
invented entitlements to allow us to ration abundance
and defended the inevitable injustices of our grim calculus
at the barricades of revolution against rival reckonings.
IX.
The fire vouched for every other appetite
with the implacable voraciousness of its own
and so we thought it reasonable to consume each other
as indiscriminately as we consumed the world about us,
with no regard for what we damaged or destroyed along the way,
and so our society became a process of digestion
that reduced all virtue to the price it can fetch at market,
and we were taught to tolerate this betrayal by betraying others,
that this is the way of things in the age of fire,
whose principle is scarcity rather than abundance,
as the fire consumes without replenishing its source
and we emulate the fire in our greed, our recklessness,
our disregard for the earth.
X.
We thought she was dead because we burned her,
we didn't burn her because we thought she was dead.
We didn't burn women because we believed they were witches,
we believed they were witches because we burned them,
and the piles of dead livestock burned to eliminate contagion,
the beacon of Grenfell shining through the small hours,
the artificial sun blossoming over Hiroshima,
the chimneys of Auschwitz,
all testify to the upside-down logic of the age of fire,
and filth spills in plumes from the bonfire
and mixes with and marbles our clouds
and bestows on us the most magnificent of sunsets
with the ash of that artificial volcano that is our civilisation
in the days before the world's end,
the days before the end of the age of fire,
and when the end came, as it must
those whose job it was to keep the fire burning,
in a fit of petulance, threatened to burn everything down
and turned the fire into a weapon, and war was born,
making real orphans among the rubble of bombed cities.
We'd know more, but they burned the evidence.
XI.
But there was no fire. There never was.
The destruction was always entirely our fault.
There was a congregation of hot incandescent vapours
in which we chose to see a fire
in the same way we choose to see a blade
hidden in a lump of virgin flint,
see the shaft of a spear in every pine,
see a profit withheld from us by the savage
until he makes the trade that is our manifest destiny
at spear-point if needs be: we'll burn his village if he doesn't.
The fire was always just an excuse. We were the fire.
XII.
We consumed the forests, the living one above the ground
and the dead ones below. We resurrected
black blood of long dead animals from subterranean reservoirs
and conferred a parody of breath on them once more
as we gulped it into our furnaces and exhaled it
in great plumes from our chimney stacks
in the extravagant necromancy of our zombie economics,
and the fire in our mind made life unbearable,
and that is what separated us from the animals
to travel alone in our metal ark of extinctions
upon the sea of fire that flooded our mind
in the forty thousand generations of our species.
We weren't orphans, we were in self-imposed solitude
as isolated and erratic as the sparks and embers
lifted by rising air above the fires around which we danced,
which we worshiped, which we guarded as eternal
or rekindled at Olympus, the camp fire that keeps the dark at bay
as it prowls, hungry, indiscriminate, waiting to eat us
beyond the light demarcating the provinces of animal and man.
XIII.
We assumed we were superior to animals
and exiled them from our ark,
having liberated ourselves from fear with fire,
having repelled all predators with its mystery,
yet what is life for us now but a single safe moment
attenuated over three score years and ten,
a split second of relief diluted with all the time allowed to us,
while the lives of our inferiors are vivid, vibrant,
with a torrent of all the instantaneous terrors and ecstasies
that we have forsworn,
and all our histories echo down hollow centuries of nothing,
and time itself is measured by the palpitations
of a mechanical heart upon the wrist or mantelpiece
that has beat for us since the day our own hearts stopped.
XIV.
We think there are no miracles.
There is only an absence of miracles,
our perception is that the miraculous is exceptional
rather than ubiquitous.
But what we consider miraculous is normal,
and what we consider normal is a world
in which we have stopped being able to see miracles
because we have illuminated it with our fires,
fires that do not replenish the stock they consume,
fires that clear the world for our plough.
XV.
Before he appeared as man,
our god first appeared to us as fire,
in the desert, a burning bush in the wilderness,
a fire that burned while it consumed not,
and as we make our fires in his image,
we discover we are not gods
for our fires destroy what they touch.
XVI.
This is the end of the age of fire.
Our god no longer needs to announce himself with fire.
We are the authors of our own apocalypse.
The fire is our ego,
or rather, its indignation at the world's indifference,
and it would burn the whole world down
and it makes us the authors of the apocalypse
as the climate turns sour,
unless we learn to embrace our own insignificance.
XVII.
We didn't invent the light. We invented darkness:
the night that was once filled with sounds and stars and wonder
was banished beyond the perimeter set by our camp fire,
becoming something to fear, and squint at,
with eyes unadjusted to the dark.
God announces himself with fire
only because we have invented darkness,
and when we try to emulate him,
our own announcements - beacons
lit across the forty thousand generations of the age of fire
- take the form of tower blocks burning in the night,
nuclear detonations turning the desert to glass,
concentration camp chimneys,
the ramparts of glaciers collapsing into the sea,
the desperate peregrinations of animals deprived of habitat,
extinctions, and the irreversible bequest of methane
from thawing permafrost and warming ocean sediments.
XVIII.
This is what the fire in our hands has made possible.
It is a material with which to conjure darkness,
until the dark side of the Moon is the only Eden we deserve,
one to which we strenuously try to return
among the crowds cheering the moon-shot launch
named after an ancient Greek sky god.
We landed a man safely on the Moon
and returned him safely to Earth fifty years ago.
Now for the rest of us. What about the rest of us?
What Earth do we have to return to anymore?
As for the fantasies of billionaires today:
you cannot escape the fire in a rocket.
XIX.
If I could go back again, from the end of the age of fire
to that first artificial dawn when fire first was kindled
and carried to the back of the cave, a source of fear and awe
that relegated all other fears to the shadows,
that let us overcome those other fears with its light,
that usurped the commonplace as the source of miracles,
I would tell my ancestors this: you are not orphans.
Our mother is not dead. The fire is not real,
and as its hot, incandescent vapours disperse
it would leave only a name, a word, hanging in the air,
an excuse to treat others as though they were as disposable
as the fuel the fire consumed. I would say there is no excuse,
we are not orphans, the earth is not dead and flammable.
We do not need the fire anymore. The sun and wind
will give us all we need. We need not burn anything ever again.
XX.
And I would say our mother forgives us,
Indeed, she requires no redemption,
because her love was always unconditional,
there are no rules she has set which we have transgressed,
no commandments chiseled on tablets of stone,
no tree the fruit of which she has forbidden to us.
All she ever wanted was to know what we need,
and she leaves it up to us to tell her what that is.
