(campfire poetry) WE ARE FIRE, WE COULD BE WATER

Flickering, fluttering, licking all it touches
Through another log it goes;
Spreading warmth, consuming everything,
Atoms and particles
Splitting and shifting in throes.

Fascination, energy at its purest.
An open flame, made malleable
By the hands that feed it or quench it.
There is no greater exhibition
Of something as infallible
In its awe-inspiring might
It is an eternal fight
Between that which is to be consumed
And that which is to be construed
Into something new, and different.

And so, we are one with the element
That awes us and terrifies us at the same time.
Our life is built
On the graveyard of our ancestry;
Our homes are powered
Through the sacrificial burning of past lives.
The food we eat is life from our perspective,
Yet it is death itself for all else.
The trees we cut down, the animals we torture,
The lives we take, the populations we uproot;
Our way of life is an endless reenactment
Of an ant being crushed by a boot
No life is sacred, all can be loot.

We are fire, we could be water;
A more gentle element than most.
A soothing, balming agency
Like the overachiever who dares not boast.
Both are harmful in excess,
Both can be destructive,
Only one is restorative.

And so, we choose to be fire;
We torch, burn, consume,
Until all that is around us
Transitions to its post-human state.
A lifeless mass of black and grey,
An emotionless, bottomless decay.

Alas, as these ruminations grind to a halt,
I find myself desperately looking for the fault
That has created the chasm that brought us here.
Where exactly did we go wrong?
How did we go from being masters of our fate
To this dark, ominous presence
That shrouds all there is?

The Renaissance, the Enlightenment,
and all the revolutions that were and will be;
The great men and women who dedicated their lives
For a better future.
To you, we should apologise - although it wasn't all in vain,
There still is a thousand-mile journey
One that has not gone very far.

And so, we choose to be fire,
When we could be water...