Fire: A Commissioned Poem

Deceptive appearance,
Countless predecessors,
Poems built on towers of strength,
Of and on
Fire..

Who am I,
A beleaguered working poet
Dared and daring,
To add to what Dante
Already has writ,
Has fire, his, not ennobled
All man's fears and lives.

What new can this temporal man add, on something so holy as
Fire?

On the altar in the Temple,
My ancestors brought sacrifices,
Guilt offerings for sins committed,
Asking for real forgiveness from a deity unseen,
They set themselves on fire,
Through animal sacrifices.

Let us not critique them by standards of today.
Let me celebrate their faith, their truth that
Asking for forgiveness required sacrifice,
Not just tithing, not just check writing,
But by acknowledging that they understood,
That nothing is for truly real until
It has been crucibled of, in,
Fire.