Poetry Friday: Our World is On Fire!

This week, we’ve dealt with smoke from the wildfires in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Canada drifting down to infuse our air with haze, pollutants, odors, and sometimes ash.

Our air quality index was as high as 500, as it was last night. Just so you understand the scale, 00-50 for an air quality index is what is considered “good” or posing no threat to human health.

I’ve written on fire before.

The first time was after Lahaina burned in August of 2023. I wrote a cento. And, last year, I started another poem when I saw what the flames of a wildfire did to the Giant Sequoias in Sequoia National Park and Mariposa Grove. I need to work on this one more – it is still evolving – just a like a fire.

Ode to Lahaina Town:
A Cento for Lahaina After The Wildfire

I stand quietly on Front Street
balancing the sun on my head. (Shaffer, Lahaina Noon)

Large sea turtles and some whales
will outlive us, water a manifestation of wind in another dimension. (Dodd Lee, Suffering the Unattainable)

The enigma of August. (Rappleye, A Path Between Houses)
What does the sun see through pages of smoke? (Muske-Dukes, Wildfire Moon)

I whirled through transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place: (Ammons, Still).

Some say the world will end in fire (Frost, Fire and Ice).
To think that we are now here, and bear our part! (Whitman, To Think of Time)

© Carol Labuzzetta, 2023.

Why a Cento? Cento means patchwork. The Hawaiian islands are patchwork stitched together by history. The lines I borrowed for my Cento are attributed to the authors’ and their work listed to the right of the lines.

I wrote this during the first week of August 2023, less than a fortnight after my mom died, surprising myself that I had it in me at the time. But Maui and Lahaina are not easily forgotten.

We had last been to Lahaina in January of 2022 and had visited old town, the iconic bayan tree, and the waterfront, unknowing this place would be changed forever by wildfire. Our last visits, 2015, and 2009 were much the same, visiting the iconic places and patronizing the businesses in old town – although we stayed to the North by Kapalua.

Fire changes us all, whether landscape or human. It does its job and moves on.


My other poem was started when we visited Sequoia and Yosemite National Park last May/June (2025) is less dramatic and too sexualized according to my family critics. Yet, I’ll share a draft of it today because fire is on my mind.

And, lastly, I found links to poetry concerning fire online:

https://lithub.com/the-element-that-defines-america-ten-great-american-poems-and-a-whole-book-of-poetry-about-fire/

Other things keeping me busy this week are gardening (when possible because of the smoke), jewelry making, drawing, and our cabin project for the summer – a walkway to the dock. You can always check my Medium.com page for more of my writing, too.

View at Medium.com

View at Medium.com

Our Poetry Friday host this week is Jill Daily at her blog, here. Thanks for hosting, Jill.