Fire Gathering
By striking stone like this on stone
we flake a fragment of the jagged pain
exchanged when angry clouds lash out
at hunch-backed hills and growl at sprawling plains.
By wrapping breath – soft breath – in straw
we draw a single fibre from those cores
of hurt that writhe in dry bruised scrubland,
fierce enough to swell and swallow forest.
The cradled ache begins
to pulse and spread and stretch the skin of darkness
to a dome where we can watch
ourselves. A ring of facing-inward eyes
sees past a ring of shoulders
into opened ground; we can deny
surprise to any shadow-born
intrusion creeping in to seize us singly.
Our breathing back and forth
is roughened by the thick and shifting air
whose curling throat-catch taste persuades
our hunger it is satisfied. Our minds
are freed to hold dark fears
beyond arm’s length. Sometimes we hear, within
this borrowed wound protecting us,
a crack of extra blackness being broken.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is a semi-retired mathematician and fully-functioning poet who has published three chapbooks and two full collections (see http://mikeb-b.blogspot.co.uk/). He is poetry editor of the on-line magazine London Grip and a co-organiser of Poetry in the Crypt readings in Islington.