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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Author: Mary Waterfield

How Fire is Made

The dewdrop of atoms.
The way water cuts a glacier in two.
Divided sleep
between two fires of sunset and dawn.
Why the heart is made of ash.
To live it burned in fire,
touched the mouth of another
and ignited.
Even the diamond burns in the light,
fills the hands
with the brightness of a prayer,
hides in the blackest space
and becomes a star.

The waste of the sea
consumed in foam,
a rolling tide of brightness,
fire from the white volcanoes
in its darkness,
where the earth consumes itself.
The fire inside the cold ambition
of a saint,
the child glowing in the sun with radiance.

Everything warmed and moved
by its conflagration,
until there is nothing in the end.
Until the space left by fire
waits for the last moment of eternity
and blazes up,
to begin again,
how fire is made.