Kate Delany Verse-Virtual 2016 June

June 2016

I live in New Jersey, just outside Philly, with my husband, Seth, my seven year old daughter, Samara, three year old son, Felix and our black cat, Potato Chip. In addition to writing and teaching college English, much of my time is spent gardening, sewing, and making and selling herbal remedies via my little online store, Tigers Eye Botanicals. My publications include a chapbook, Reading Darwin, published by Poets Corner Press, and a full length collection, Ditching, is forthcoming via Aldrich Press.

Enkindling the Need-Fire
"But we must naturally ask, how did it come about that benefits so great and manifold were supposed
  obtained by means so simple... the application of fire and smoke, of embers and ashes?"
-Sir James Frazer, The Fire Festivals of Europe
All I know is this:
we will survive this way,
marred with the scars
of human experience,
we will survive this way.

We have come here
from every corner of our pain,
strangers in search of a reckoning space,
to this tundra, we set aglow with our tears.

We thought our ancestors left this habit at home
in the highlands and in the Black Hills.
Little did we know
that fire is perennial,
and still feels like a sacrament.

And so the thorny underbrush is the first
to crackle and hiss with the hope of the need-fire.
We circumvent the stake
venerating heat, light
and vaporous strength.
The moment,
like health and happiness,
is fleeting.
For our grief,
we have built a bonfire.

A child has died,
the crops have failed,
my father has gotten cancer.
Like aching saints,
we turn to fire.

In time,
I learn to enkindle the flame internal,
after the hierophany has passed,
grappling for your hands.
Holding on to one another
is our strength
and last defense.

All I know is this—
we will survive this way,
bearing the badges and bruises of human existence,
as we always have
and always will,
the inexhaustible embers
in the belly of need-fire.

"Enkindling the Need-Fire" originally appeared in Witches and Pagans.