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Welcome to Poetic Licence – a weekly poetry forum, hosted by us, featuring words by local poets. This week? Russell Thornton.
Wildfire: Photos
Light laying out a new dead field.
Drought level 3, drought level 4 --
smoke floating across a lake, fire lurching down a hillside
of homes: instead of the invisible wall 

separating a town from fire, an immense off-the-grid

face revealing itself close-up. It is now
that residents rush to find photos --
old volumes spilling prints, colour, black & white;
they are grabbing what is left in stone-lined pits.
Extended families, forbears,
are the millet sown in spring and harvested in summer,
the wheat and barley sown in fall and harvested in spring --
it is now that the suddenly starving eat,

feed the slow-burning carbon of their cells,

unroll the old film there like a prophecy. Homeless,


they turn their faces to rain, the film develops,

and they dream the albums they could not save,

the golden grasses, the storehouses full of grain.ÌýÌý
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Russell Thornton is the author of six collections of poetry, including The Hundred Lives (2014), shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain (2013), shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize. His other titles include The Human Shore, , A Tunisian Notebook and The Fifth Window. His newest collection, The Broken Face, is due out in 2018. Thornton lives in North Vancouver. Ìý ÌýÌý
To submit your own poetry to Poetic Licence, email [email protected] with Poetry Column in the subject line. Include your poem, full name, contact details and bio. Only those selected for the column will be contacted.
