Poetry

"Lake of Fire"

by James Courtney

the city

hastened to pull up

the rose petals of the fire

blooming with a hundred years

booming and popping

like a storm under water.

I came to look

for figures of ash,

and stared hard

at a musty comfort materialized

and displaced

at the slight glow cast buzzing into

the falling tears of an ancient virgin

at chance's cold stare

tumbling down through a red aura in the night sky

caught by newspaper hands

and abandoned into the memory of the television.

a hot lake of tears

couldn't melt the ice of history

clinging patchy at my heart

and couldn't drip inward

to calm a shaky mouth into sharing

the incompleteness of truth represented by my memories.

what was lost? what, after all, is ours to lose?

once all the fire hoses are wound back up

the devil himself

couldn't stop the smiles from showing again,

leaving you and me with the burden

of containing a living building creaking with old wood smell

and translating it

into a thick and healing yellow light.

we shall all know that

a home can never be destroyed as long as it exists first in the heart.

this is just like the night when the heavens will burn

and there will be nothing left to do

but reflect that awful shine defiantly back into the blackness

and sing.