Names of Fire, By Radiance Angelina Petro

Names of Fire

By

Radiance Angelina Petro

 

 

Autumn opens her notebooks,

sending words sailing into the streets

never once looking back.

She lends them to the wind

where they are bolstered by many

changes of direction.

 

She knows who we are.

She accepts us as we are—cornstalk fiddles

trying to tune our lives into song.

 

She knows we are apprentices

of the sun, and that few have ever seen

pineapple groves or wandered further

into the mountains.

 

Autumn knows our spirits are tightly

wound spools in need of loosening, so

she coaxes us into wide spaces,

into scouring rains and gloom,

through the smoke of burning leaves,

into the growing, early darkness,

where we hastily scrawl her messages

into linsey-woolsey phrases

with hopes we’ll turn, transformed,

and strong, and change our names into fire

against winter’s coming cold.