Poetry For Fighting Fires - Washington Poet Laureate Focuses On Our State

Fires Near Lake Chelan, August 2015
Elizabeth Austen, Washington State Poet Laureate is creating an anthology of poems calling attention to the wildfires currently blazing in our state. Firefighters have come from as faraway as Australia to help with the worst fires in Washington State history. I am honored to have one of my fire poems included.


Childhood Study: Fires Late August

Awake in the middle of the night,
we listen to the grass crackle, to the new world of evacuate.

Like monkeys we screech as the trees go pop—

yellow candelabras, we see and then not.
Now danger damages our capillaries

for the first time, the ladder trucks and sirens

seem like small toys compared with
the neighbor’s fire-fangled trees.

What lit-up between us that summer—


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