Poem: “Kindling”
April 27: 30 days of new poems for National Poetry Month
Published in
Apr 28, 2024
Kindling
There is something about the fire that centers
us. Not as individuals, but as a collective. We
don’t face one another as we talk. We face
the fire. Each of us, from where we sit around
it, speaks into it. The fire gathers our stories,
our wisdom, and returns them to us as connection.
The Surgeon General declared a loneliness
epidemic and identified connection as the antidote.
The verb “to splinter” has no antonym. It is
a problem with no solution. This is why
life is both a lake and a branch, and why
only “branch” has two meanings. And yet,
we can be whittled into kindling. For we are
not so much baptized by fire as immunized.
