After Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions

And the Turtle replied:

I saw my mother burn

in a forest fire

birthed by the flick of a cigarette.

I tried to reason with Fire

but Fire wouldn’t listen to my turtle speak

when Fire’s flame-bone body

climbed trunks to suffocate leaves.

Below Fire, my mother‘s body

consumed in black

char that gives no nod

to the memory

of when I first poked

my head out of my shell

as she smiled on a bed

of orange leaves.

After the firefighter’s spray

extinguished Fire,

I waddled to the Turtle Police Station

to demand they arrest Fire.

Fire killed my mother

I spat at the timber front desk

but the secretary said

we can’t arrest a Fire that died.

That Fire’s ghost

roams through the black forest

where my mother screams.

I‘m the only one who listens.

Originally published in Hare’s Paw Literary Review (November 2021)