Perhaps it is a poet’s curse, but I have always felt like I have one foot in this life and one foot searching for someplace else, like trying to feel for your other shoe in the dark. This other place can’t be explained but feels like home. Perhaps it’s just a matter of physics: the natural tendency of particles or energy to connect with other particles and energy. Or perhaps it’s that age-old existential question that people have been asking for eons—What am I doing HERE and not THERE? I guess there’s no better place to contemplate this frustrating unanswerable than in front of a fireplace—the wood crackling, the soul yearning, and high above, the burning stars joining in. This poem was published in Hole in the Head Review.
Burning
Night’s come early, settled in like a roosting bird
fluffed against the cold.
Outside my window, snow has replaced the known world
with a simpler version of itself
while inside, the fireplace sparks and glows,
reducing logs to chunks of red-hot cinder
so bright it hurts. I am alone,
listening to the fire spit and sizzle as it performs
its incendiary miracle, converting matter
to light. Why am I so far from what I seek?
Why is it so hard to still this yearning?
I’m not the only one. We all burn,
trying to return to our origin, even the stars,
far above this small house
tucked in the corner of this tidy neighborhood
on the outskirts of this snow-stilled town.
Their burning reaches me across the frozen
distances, long after they’ve gone.
PONO POETRY 