This week’s poem, Meghan Sterling’s “Pyrocumulonimbus,” contemplates the fires that continue to rage out West. I love this poem’s wonderfully specific sensory imagery, and how it interweaves its images with the speaker’s own powerful memories and mourning.

Sterling is the author of the recently released poetry collection “These Few Seeds” (Terrapin Books) and co-editor of the anthology “A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis” (Littoral Books). Her chapbook, “How We Drift,” was published by Blue Lyra Press, and she is associate poetry editor for the Maine Review. She lives in Portland with her family.

 

Pyrocumulonimbus

By Meghan Sterling

 

Astronauts say that space smells of walnuts;

acrid, sweet, with a hint of ozone, like wine

sipped in an empty room. Lately, the scent is toasted,

 

so much earth engulfed in flame. Seen from above,

it’s almost beautiful, almost a symphony— small orange dots

swallowed by masses christened by the Greek: clouds born of fire.

 

They cross over and under in monstrous braids of smoke,

racing across the forests— Blue Jay, Feather, Slink—

tearing through a landscape that once sheltered me

 

from despair. I remember looking out over the Oakland redwoods,

deep into dim mountains gold as ink in a slanted sun, and felt

the world’s beauty was enough to live for.

 

Now all is soft falling ash, ash we might mistake for snow

but for the enormous heat, the way ash sticks to the body

like memory, like grief.

 

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Pyrocumulonimbus,” copyright © 2021 by Meghan Sterling, appears by permission of the author.

Copy the Story Link