Fetid breeze; smoke roils as fiendish claws,
Rending the air around me silent,
Stopping my breath in a world wholly
Victorious, acrid and acute.
Where was the house we held ourselves kin
Lay coals and reeking stumps of sofas,
An unscorched basket of magazines,
Slumping rafters, puddles of gray muck,
Extinct blocks fired and refired, finely
Cracked as the brittle flesh of this hand,
Conflagration-boiled and rotten black,
Cradling garbage frivolously.
The insulting furnace gnarled, vagrant,
Self-destroyed and surely forgetful,
Whose heat could be loved, calamitous,
A mordant outrage too hot to hide –
Oh! Are we here secure and all cool,
Unmolested by flames whose intent
Renders mute all protests and whining:
A mercy appalling inner eyes?
We stand unstable, frayed, inert, less
Than dead, too weak to die if death knew,
Faces turned or turning wan and wise,
Clasping each other with empty hands.
