Though from Here I Can’t Smell the Smoke

In medieval frescoes haloed saints are edged in flame 
when God is around,
melting like a rumor
to the corners of a room,
giving off heat. Tulip-tipped, sky-bright. 

These days, they name fires like saints:

Willow, Glass, Dixie, August, Wolf,
Live Oak, Snow, Point, Camp, Creek. I’m feeling thermal

as my home state burns 
up another set of firsts.

I watch footage on repeat:

embers fly, jump highways, scrape
life from gnarled hillsides. Soot
in the atmosphere. Viewable

from space. I turn
the volume up: interference on the microphone, ash-colored, this pitch
of burning, this tunnel
funneling waves—

The glowing perimeter thrums, widens.
Rim of the world, smoldering.

Where did my edges go?
What holds
head to neck, hand to fingers,
brain to sickness?
I can feel the stitches lift—

The flame stalks, flowers 
up, and eats

now stands of trees, now scrub
and mountain underbrush. The sky
gauzes with smoke

and air
that rustles—spark and sear
of holy cellophane.

Copyright © 2023 by Allison Hutchcraft. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 6, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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About the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize

“By juxtaposing the escalation of wildfires with the saints in medieval frescos, ‘Though from Here I Can’t Smell the Smoke’ shows our current climate emergency to be also a spiritual crisis. The stakes here could not be higher: vast, existential, and urgent.”
—Dr. Peter Kalmus and Matthew Olzmann

“I grew up beneath the San Gabriel Mountains, just north of Los Angeles, where fire is part of the natural ecosystem. Yet years of fire suppression and climate change have made fires increasingly catastrophic. I wrote this poem in 2021 from North Carolina, where I now live. Over and over, I replayed videos of that year’s Dixie Fire, which burned nearly one million acres in one hundred and four days. I was also leafing through medieval art books: images of saints crowned in flames; angels holding out golden bowls to catch blood from Christ’s wounds. I do not believe in a religious apocalypse, but I am troubled by a cataclysmic climate change of our own making. The combined effects of those videos on repeat, of flamed frescoes painted centuries ago, and of technology that brings far-away disasters close, were dizzying.”
—Allison Hutchcraft