My head rests against the car window, motion of the highway rattling my teeth in my small skull.
I see the mountain’s peak crest the horizon
and know that I am home.
Fire strikes in the dry season–
at night you can see spots of
trees ablaze, incandescent
orange glow on the foliage
like the call of fireflies through
the crisp summer nights of my youth.
The land bore the marks of the blaze for a while yet, scorched
paths torn ragged across the underbrush.
I bore them too. The walls were closing in then, flame
licking at my heels. The deer and birds and vermin fled the
destruction, and I alongside them,
a wild thing all my own.
In the clearing we gathered, and we could not discern
our soot-covered fur from
the shadows we cast upon the ground.
The embers retained their heat. In time,
our scarred hands have used them to tend the hearth over razing the home.
We have come from afar, specked with the shining marks of countless little fires. In our
nascent, fledgling forest, the lingering heat warms our hearts, not burns our bodies—at daybreak,
a sharp beam of sunlight cuts
across the ashen earth.
My home has gone, but as a tree
forms its mottled flesh around a wound, it has reformed anew–
green, young, resplendent.
Comments from contest judge Zackary Vernon: “Asbestos” is a poem about grief and loss, but through it we also see the possibility of hard-won hope and renewal in the aftermath of tragedy.
