Anne Caldwell
We strip the fields and lanes, gather piles of wood, strawbales, rotten doors, lost chairs. It’s rained for months and the valley smoulders like a bad mood. The bonfire won’t catch light. I make a paper lantern from withies, tissue, PVA and an old tea light. Watch it rise in the dusk like a new planet. My first love was a pyrotechnician. Ephemeral. He knew the secrets of black powder, gun powder, saltpetre. He could dazzle, colour the world yellow and orange from steel and charcoal.
Somewhere else, a passenger plane disintegrates over the Egyptian desert. Somewhere else a young boy steps on a roadside IED. At home your child lights his sparkler from the gas cooker. Fire writes his name for the first time.
Anne Caldwell is a poet, lecturer and editor. Her fourth collection is a book of prose poetry called Alice and the North (Valley Press). She is interested in place writing, eco-poetics and experimenting with genres and won a flash fiction competition this year. She is currently working as a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow. Website: www.annecaldwell.net
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