Foolishness + Fire

Standing in the fire complaining about the rain. Saying look, look how hard I burn. I built these flames, chopped the wood from a tree I fell with these bare hands, up rooted from the soil I laid, dragged with a wheel barrow, built from the scraps of my great great grandfathers first car, down a gravel road fifteen miles long.

Look now how orange the flames burn and the warm smell of birch bark as the edges roll back curling over themselves in the heat. Heat I made that crawls between my toes, heat that slaps behind my knees, up my back. This fire is mine, if you want some you will pry it cold from my dead hands.

I warm this land, look at the logs, splitting in the fire pit, charcoaled logs I carried on my back for a year, since I crawled from the womb I’ve had logs on my back. We all did and it was a better way of learning to walk, with all that weight, I was stronger, built better. Even with shin braces, at age six, that only made the world simpler. I got where I needed to go because of values, because of faith. That is what carries the weight of those logs. Even when squeakily I walked into the recruitment office to serve the very country I dumped the soil on that would grow the tree that is burning here.

See the heat lick my teeth and these tears are not for being wide eyed in the clouds of smoke circling me but for this here heartland, that I would die for, and for the right to tell you not to set your foot on this here heartland. Land my ancestors founded, land that never belonged to no one else, land that took two hundred years of toil, sweat, and blood to be settled. Land where I rode horses, brown lightning through the wild grass, cracking at my ankles, thinking we deserved to outrun the fired colors of sunset.

Look now how the orange flames take my ears and my knuckles are raw and white, see the puff of my chest escape pulled out of me, the heart inside me washed brown then black charcoaled like the logs, that turn to ash, to be ground in and walked over powerless to the next boot that will set foot upon this here land.