The Burning: A Poem

Have you seen the way water
In a swimming pool, a pond,
Even a little birdbath like this,
In its reflection under the eaves –
Brushed with a subtle breeze –
Becomes the very image of flame?
It is exactly the look of a pale
And shadowy fire – the way
Burning fumes wreathe and rise,
Vanish and return, in constant
Consuming renewal – such is
The soft blaze in this patch of light.
But it destroys nothing: it is itself
What is, or will be, destroyed,
As its parent fire responds
To the shifting of the earth and
Leaves these eaves to harden
Back into blank painted wood.
It is merely a mirror of destruction,
Like a play on the idea, a fantasy
Of incandescence, conflagration:
This that motivates, fuels, unreason,
The life of dream, the desire
To consume and be consumed.
In every such moment of wonder,
Of imaginative contemplation,
Is dis-attachment from the real,
And this has one longing: to lose
And be lost, which is to come
Alive in the world’s cremation.
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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

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