Night Fire

The geography is unimportant.
It is a place of cold,
a place where
you are left fragile, brittle,

easily broken,
but never quite beyond repairing.

Somewhere there is a fire,
almost in sight,
unavailable, unavoidable,
a light in the dark,

Fascinating. Fearful,
it lights the dark
and threatens to melt
the ice walls that surround you.

About this poem

The picture is of a fort that my son and the neighborhood kids built last week, before the warm weather and rain melted all the snow in Vermont. Of course I snapped pictures and told myself a poem would come of some of them one day.

This morning, it arrived.

Tom