xxii. Signs and Wonders

Fire:

c.1200, furen, figurative, "arouse, excite;" literal sense of "set fire to" is from late 14c., from fire (n.).

Solstice

I lit the fire early in a grate of ice

fruit wood and wrist-thick old briar

catching quickly and climbing in coils

spreading along the ceiling of the low roofed sky.

I pulled an old garden chair to its rough hearth

to the spit and hiss of rose oil

and the sweet fume of sawn apricot and peach

sunk in a warm corner of the garden framed with cold.

Inertia was everything, moving only for books and coffee

my breath a small bellows in the aching air

late afternoon the grass still rimed with white

a gathering shortness drew up the flight of hours

to the dark squat chimney of the evening and the coals

of morning, a ramble of rose hips and bright orange fruit.

Jeff Guess

Reflection:

In 1861 Julia W. Howe wrote “the Battle Hymn of the Republic’. This hymn was born during the American civil war, when Howe visited a Union Army camp on the Potomac River near Washington, D. C. She heard the soldiers singing the song “John Brown’s Body,” and was taken with the strong marching beat. She wrote the words the next day:

I awoke in the grey of the morning, and as I lay waiting for dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to entwine themselves in my mind, and I said to myself, “I must get up and write these verses, lest I fall asleep and forget them!” So I sprang out of bed and in the dimness found an old stump of a pen, which I remembered using the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.

Many of the verses are charged with images of fire.