high fire danger
This morning when I left home in the dark to go running, I thought I could see the orange glow of grass fires in the distance. By the time we started our run, the sun seemed hesitant and sleepy in its rising, an orange haze slowly painting across the eastern sky. Beautiful and I couldn’t help but wonder whether some of the vibrancy was in part due to fires burning.
Last year I spent some time writing a series of poems in response to the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires. Between September 2019 and March 2020 fires burnt more than 46 million acres. Homes and towns were destroyed, 34 people died, billions of animals perished, and many people had to flee their homes. Those of us not directly impacted watched on, through daily coverage in the news, checking in with loved ones to make sure they were safe.
At the end of last year I participated in an Arts NT Varuna Writer’s residency, giving me the chance to further develop these poems with some peer support and mentoring. I realised that in order to proceed with the poems, I needed to navigate finding a voice in this global conversation around extreme weather events and climate change. I didn’t want to end up with a suite of poems that left readers feeling weighed down in a sense of anxiety and despair. This series of poems, titled ‘high fire danger’, is close to being finished. I’ve come to realise that in writing the poems I’m shouting this warning of a ‘high fire danger’ to myself as much as to the world, to take heed of what is already happening in this time of great transition for our planet. And my intent is that in the poems there is also a thread of beauty and hope that there is still action we can take, it is not too late.
This song steals a few lines from my poems – seven lines of lyrics, layered in a six minute track. A lot of space to sit with a topic as weighty as this.
there’s a high fire danger
as the sky dissolves to red
an eerie filter on the world
smoke rises in a sooty tower
climbing, reaching into the sky
high above, a pyrocumulonimbus cloud forms
high above, fuelled from below
