David Finkelstein

A Tribute to Fire: At a Far Distance

It flickers in the dim room light,

A thin fragile splinter,

A taste of the essence of beauty,

A perfect shade of orange, just licking,

Through and around,

The black, lava-like logs,

Reminding of a lava flow,

Bright red and yellow and almost pure white,

Yet solid black on top,

Looking on from a small distance,

Entranced by its eternal dance,

A fiery slippery tendril,

Licking the fire, reaching,

Stretching, tasting, the rough taste of wood,

Flying up sometimes fast sometimes slow,

Soft, like liquid fire, a sort of thin, slippery lava,

Running up the sometimes smooth, sometimes jagged,

Surface of the fuel which drives the fire,

A hungry beast, devouring its hearty meal,

The wood crackles as it burns,

Every minute or two, as the coals glow bright yellow,

And the smoke, looking like the ghost of a fire long dead,

Rise up from various places in the burning logs,

Doomed to die, the whiffs of this grey ghost-like substance rise up,

Through the air above the metal prison, in which the fire resides,

Not 15 minutes later, the fire is all but gone, left are but a few,

Flicks of red, desperately trying to live on, if only for a moment,

Then a minute later the fire has died out, and all that remains,

Is its smoky ghost. ●