after the fire…

Later, when the smoke from the forest fires receded, a friend who lived closer to the decimated treeline tells us that the sun began to burn again and I was able to look out on the fire scape that was receding, visible beyond the firebreak, split in three as in the aftermath of a nightmare: from midway/day up the hill to the summit the few remaining trees, meadows emerging from the grey ash as if encouraged the wetness from the nights rain, beneath a luminous sky — and further away nothing but dead blackened things, burnt houses, decayed ruins, fallen burnt trees/tries. Men searching the ashes for the dead. The first green shoots. The everyday world as it appears to us, but which this friend had never seen.