Today's poem is by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

Fire Bug
       

My mother did not talk to fire,
nor my father to the gods
though they swarmed our
house like insects: the god
of shame was paramount,
its minions of reproach and
remorse; not to mention guilt
and bad conscience, fear
and distrust: they burrowed
into the wood like carpenter's
bees, into the walls like termites.
I suppose if my mother had
conversed with fire, from
the artificial logs in the fireplace
to the butts of her cigarettes
and her father's cigar embers,
she would not have complained
so much about the incompetence
of the men around her, unable to cure
what ailed their women or summon
enough money for proper doctors.
If my father had access to the gods,
imagine how that would have shifted
the dynamics; with someone to
blame or absorb our protests;
someone to accuse of contaminating
minds with doubt and hearts with defects.
Perhaps my own life would not have
been so directionless, like the wind
that blows backward, prying husks
from palms, bark from eucalyptus,
revealing the raw material, like muscle
and sinew, that feed such a troubled
incandescence.

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Copyright © 2024 Jane Rosenberg LaForge All rights reserved
from Twelve Mile Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission