You held the fire in your hands.
You watched the embers burn, held the memories in your hands, held the silences, their emptiness.
You were braiding the sky with flame. You were listening for the cry.
Time was a hunger swallowing despair, desperation, and always the strange colonies of cloud overhead, time speaking in tongues.
You were driving right into the storm.
You were asleep at the wheel, or aiming your father’s gun, halting thought with your own blood.
You were childless, you were yourself a child
waiting for the muzzle’s flash and still, for the eternity of light, star in the eyes, for the simple, impossible brilliance and afterimage billowing out
as you were thrust into that secret dark where no one escapes, no one remembers,
where you’ll remain, in the end, frightened and alone,
holding the fire in your hands.
Copyright © 2025 by Rob Arnold. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 11, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.