"Fire Broom" by Dia Calhoun

Fire Broom

Five years after the wildfire
I face the dead —
pines who once sang me down the canyon trail
black skeletons now
mourn the mountainside —
confounded arrows
pointing everywhere and nowhere.
Fire obliterated the old trail.

Grief-staggered, my bones blacken toward lost.
A bubbling chime turns me round.
Gold Creek — dry for forty years —
hymns through the burn
shining like spilled candlelight.

Why did it take apocalypse?
Fire sweeping merciless as a wild thing —
an old goddess maybe —
scorching the land with her fire broom
so Gold Creek might flow again.

Why didn’t we heed the little fires?
Why wait for the Big One, the mandatory evacuation
when you can take nothing but your skin
no time to gather more
the fire broom is at your door.

Now Gold Creek sings
through the Everything Dead.
Whatever lived high on Hunter Mountain —
lodged in its heart
where the old gold mines caved in long ago —
is flowing out now.

Once I followed the canyon trail.
Now, black-boned, swept clean
I step into Gold Creek —
will follow it up,
let it sing me up to the mountain’s heart.

Dia Calhoun

Dia Calhoun is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun (Atheneum, 2013) and Eva of the Farm (Atheneum, 2012). She won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. One of her poems is forthcoming in the Winter 2021 Issue of The EcoTheo Review. Calhoun is a mentor in the Children’s Literature Fellows Program for Stony Brook University. Learn more at diacalhoun.com.

Headshot: Shawn R. Zink

Photo Credit: Staff