To Burn with Grace

The flame speaks to me tonight in a language

older than words, older than the wind

that brought the first spark to the first darkness.

I sit before it as one sits before a teacher

whose final lesson is silence.

See how it dances, this small sun

I have kindled with my own hands.

It does not ask to burn,

nor does it apologize for the ash it makes

of all I offer. Such is the nature

of what is true and beautiful.

The wood I gathered in summer

when the world was green and endless,

now surrenders itself, each log

becoming light, becoming warmth,

becoming memory. Nothing is lost

that transforms itself so willingly.

The rooms grow warm

from this ancient gift. Soon I will leave

this house where I have lived

my small, precious days. Tomorrow

I will journey to a place where fires

are not needed, or perhaps where

different fires burn.

But tonight belongs to this flame alone.

I have learned from fire what my books

could not teach me. That ending

and beginning are but two names

for the same doorway. That what seems

to perish is only changing form,

as the river changes to cloud,

as cloud becomes rain, as rain

returns again to the river.

The flame grows smaller now.

It does not rage against its fading.

It burns with the same quiet dignity

it held when it blazed highest.

This, too, is a kind of wisdom.

I think of all the fires that came before,

stretching back through generations,

each one tended by hands that knew,

as I know now, that fire is a bridge

between earth and sky, between

what we hold and what we must release.

The last ember glows like a jewel

in the gathering dark. I do not mourn it.

How can I mourn what has given

its entire self to me, asking nothing

but wood and air and the chance

to illuminate one small room

on one cold night?

Let it go gently into ash.

Let the ash become soil.

Let the soil cradle new seeds.

This is the way of things.

This has always been the way.

The flame gutters, grows thin as a thread,

then thinner still. And in that final moment,

just before it disappears entirely,

I see what fire has always been trying to tell us.

That we are here to burn brightly,

to give our warmth freely,

and when our time comes to fade,

to do so with grace,

knowing we have lit the darkness

as we were meant to do.

The hearth grows cold.

The room grows still.

But somewhere in the ashes,

warmth remembers itself,

waiting for morning.