Pitching your tent in the ashes

This is the ground you claim:
Softened by ash under a red sun.
It is your chosen place
For looking up at the stars—
Where no one may cover your eyes
Or tell you to move on
To some smaller sky.

I won’t complain about the fire
That created your refuge:
Lightning will strike
And we cannot push it back
Into its pocket of the sky.
There will be fire—
Even terrible fire—
And things will get burnt.

(And if it takes fire
To clear our way,
So be it.)

And as for your anger—
Every scorched life
Must give rise to blisters
Somewhere.

There is a taste of redemption
In what you have snatched from the embers,
Painting the downed forest
In such unapologetic blacks and browns
Sitting with one another
In resolute beauty.

There is left only this:
How smoke has dragged
Your voice across barbed wire—
Where it may decide to keep it.