Flamescape

Downtown is burning, again;
the flames cannot be seen
from my window, but they

reflect against both sky and
snow-topped ledges--the statuary
hanging off the church at the

Children's Park have gone from
off-white to off-pink while firehoses
do nothing but add fuel to dozens

of rose-hued icicles straining
to reach for the overly solid
ground. Soot has been falling

for hours, like pieces of broken
cloud, and the black air feels
chill on my skin¹ as I watch it

all from what passes for
a balcony. They tell me
every city wears its history,²

no surprise, is it, really,
that ours would make
us wear it as well.

This poem derives from the 2007 Thanksgiving Challenge in the Poetry Forum. The actual challenge was to begin and end a poem using a line from two works of other poets. Myself, and others, ended up choosing to simply weave our colleagues' work among our own. Also, prose pieces were fair game as source material.

¹ "the black air feels chill on my skin" from "The Ecstacy" by champagne1982

² "Every city wears its history." from "Autumn in New York" by Angeline