Poems by Kate Asche
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Night on Fire
by Kate Asche
From Canary Summer 2018
Kate lives a ten-minute walk from the south bank of the Sacramento Bar section of the American River, where she and her husband run, talk with acorn woodpeckers and eat summer blackberries on Jim's Bridge.
Hot winds threaten
to smother us
with foul brush smoke,
courtesy of churning
wildfires eighty miles
close. We close
our house. Even so,
carbon-gilded air
cinders every sill.
I dream young
swifts treen treeeeen,
nesting in our chimney
with devastating faith:
small children in a forest,
a campfire left burning.
We set our one world
aflame, obscuring
any sign
of mercy, while ash
cloaks our fingerprints’
ghostly whorls.
We mark our foreheads
and bow. We mouth
a prayer. We eat.
© Kate Asche