Fire in the Earth
Everything consumed so the road could open again
Fire in the Earth
And we know, when Moses was told,
in the way he was told,
"Take off your shoes!" He grew pale from that simple
reminder of fire in the dusty earth.
He never recovered
his complicated way of loving again
and was free to love in the same way
he felt the fire licking at his heels loved him.
As if the lion earth could roar
and take him in one movement.
Every step he took
from there was carefully placed.
Everything he said mattered as if he knew
the constant witness of the ground
and remembered his own face in the dust
the moment before revelation.
Since then thousands have felt
the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak.
Like the moment you too saw, for the first time,
your own house turned to ashes.
Everything consumed so the road could open again.
Your entire presence in your eyes
and the world turning slowly
into a single branch of flame.
-from River Flow: New & Selected Poems
The image of Moses before the burning bush has stayed with me since my childhood, and reared up as a life enhancing visionary experience many years later in the midst of a Zen retreat. Words spoken from the fire, being of course, close to the source of all poetry. The photograph was taken out with friends in the African Bush, the fire, the landscape and the chatter of all the creatures of that world welcoming the night still live on in my mind. DW
This poem feels like one of those moments when something ancient and powerful brushes against your life.
I love how Whyte turns Moses’s encounter with the burning earth into something we can all recognise.
There’s a sense that once you’ve felt that kind of fire, you can’t go back to moving through the world blindly.
Every step becomes careful, almost reverent, as if the ground itself were paying attention.
The poem captures that trembling pause when revelation strips everything down to what’s real.
I can feel the struggle to speak when language suddenly feels too small for what you’ve seen.
The shift to the image of a home reduced to ashes is heartbreaking, yet strangely honest.
It suggests that sometimes life has to burn through what we cling to before a new path appears.
The final image of the world turning into a single branch of flame is haunting and oddly comforting.
It leaves you with the sense that transformation often begins in the quiet ruins of what you thought would last.