Controlled Burn
Susan McLean

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“We used to fight all fires,” the ranger said.
“Now we start some ourselves. Unless they’re burned,
some trees won’t seed themselves.”  Nature has learned
lightning and lava’s language; just the dead
white noise of glaciers rouses no reply.

When wildfire, after long suppression, sears
the soil, debris piled up from silent years
fuels too hot a blaze, and all things die.

But who, faced with a loved scene, wants it torched?
I look back at our friendship, now dead wood,
and wonder, would a fiery intercession
revive it, phoenix-like, or leave it scorched?
Does love or rage seek flames now, to do good
or just to melt the ice sheet of depression?

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Susan’s notes:​​ “I first learned about the environmental use of controlled burns when I was accompanying college students on a trip to Florida and the Everglades. ‘Controlled Burn’ sounded like such an oxymoron, and of course controlled burns sometimes get out of control and start more catastrophic fires. At the time, I was saddened that a longtime friend had ended our friendship without any explanation. I was struggling to decide what to do about it, and this poem was a way I examined my feelings, my options, and their possible consequences. The form of the poem is a modified Petrarchan sonnet. Petrarch’s sonnets are identified with romantic love, but there is more than one kind of love. Losing any love hurts. The poem originally appeared in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

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Susan McLean is a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University. She has published two poetry collections, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Latin poems by Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her third poetry book, Daylight Losing Time, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press.

 

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