You might have saved a life tonight.
On impulse,
you might have looked
a faintly-known stranger
straight in the eyes
and caught sight of a life
waiting to ignite.
You might have reached in
and kindled it,
breathed wind
into this heat that burns
without flame,
flicked a spark
into a field of dry grass
and yelled “Live!”
or “Fire!” or “There is a gift
in these ashes that needs
to be scattered.”
Tomorrow your stranger might
awaken alert and recalled,
they might set their Wild
Fire free and watch it spread
from sleeper to sleeper
until the world
shakes itself alive
and the murky sky starts
glowing.
You might have saved a life tonight.
You might have saved us all.
Claudine Nash is an award-winning poet whose collections include her full length books Parts per Trillion (Aldrich Press, 2016) and The Wild Essential (Aldrich Press, forthcoming) as well as her chapbook The Problem with Loving Ghosts (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in a wide range of publications including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cloudbank, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Foliate Oak and Dime Store Review amongst others. She is also a practicing psychologist. www.claudinenashpoetry.com.
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