My father weighed a little less than at birth.
I carried him in both hands to the pines
as October brought the burning season. 
When I unscrewed the urn, bone-chaff and grit
streamed out. The smell of gunpowder. 
I remembered the sulphur hiss of the match —
how he taught me to breathe on the steeple of logs
until the kindling caught and flames quickened.

That night, in sleep, I saw the forest clearing
by the moor’s edge, and the ring of his ashes. 
A skirl of smoke began to rise —
bracken curling, a fume of blaeberry leaves. 
Ants broke their ranks, scattering, fleeing, 
and a moth spun ahead of the fire-wind. 
I took the path over the heath at a run. 

A voice at my shoulder said, 'You’ll inherit fire.'
And through the smoke I glimpsed a line of figures 
on the hillside, beating and beating the heather 
as the fire-front roared towards them. 
A volley of shouts: 'Keep the wind at your back!'
My grandmother threshing with a fire-broom, 
Dad hacking a firebreak. My stillborn brother, now grown, 
sprinting for the hollow where the spring once flowed, 
the whole hill flaring in the updraft. 

And there: a girl, running for the riverside —
she wore my face, the shade of ash.
from the book BURNING SEASON /  Bloodaxe Books
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
"Muirburn" received the Poetry Society’s Peggy Poole Award and was commended in the 2018 National Poetry Competition.

Yvonne Reddick on "Muirburn"
Illustration of flowers
You Make Poetry Daily

Poetry Daily is reader supported. Your donation this season will allow Poetry Daily to thrive for years to come. Thank you for all you do for poetry.
SUPPORT POETRY DAILY TODAY
Picture of a young Louise Gluck
Remembering Louise Glück

"Working with young minds quickly became a sort of nourishment. 'She was profoundly interested in people,' says Anita Sokolsky, a friend and colleague from Williams College, where Glück began teaching in 1984. 'She had a vivid and unstinting interest in others’ lives that teaching helped focus for her. Teaching was very generative to her writing, but it was also a kind of counter to the intensity and isolation of her writing.'"

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of The Diaspora Sonnets
What Sparks Poetry:
Oliver de la Paz on Language as Form

"I started writing pantoums to demarcate section breaks to rectify what I saw as an imbalance in the work. I wanted to place the pantoum, which was originally a Malaysian form, against the sonnet's Western European tradition as a subtle nod to the complications that arise when attempting to adapt to a place."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
donate
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2023 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency