Tonight, I wait for wind to become fire.
This wind is ocean, crash and clatter of inexorable squall, wind the world over.
I’ve misread live briefing as live briefly.
They’ve purpled the virtual landscape here for the first time.
One spark, and the wind is fire.
And how much time is enough?
Tonight’s impossible to sleep, to dream, the map too arid, the mortal coil too parched.
The heart aches like a furrowed pit without its flesh, the flare miles away, the blaze visible.
My skin feels cowardly as if with fever and also shrewd, too-nerved, all-knowing not what.
Prediction is mathematical fiction and the fact of fire and wind.
And who will be scorched? And when?
There’s no logic between sin and safety, just a crack of flame between two dark eternities.
If we keep up our own undoing, our existence will be extinguished altogether—all together, all of us together—much sooner than eventually.
The world will be wind. The world will be fire.
This poem first appeared in Poets Reading the News.
—
Anna Leahy’s books include the poetry collection If in Some Cataclysm, What Happened Was:, and Constituents of Matter and the nonfiction book Tumor. Her essays have won top awards from Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood. She has been a fellow at MacDowell and the American Library in Paris. More at amleahy.com.
