The Burn

 


The Burn


The small signs were there as early as June:

Leaves shed early pooling beneath the birch,

Sloes purpling the blackthorn weeks ahead,

The spent spires of docks rusting too soon

Into the long green stems of the hedgerow…

 

On our screens, Daytime TV presenters

Ticked off the Gulf Stream and El Nino,

Gave tips on Mediterranean food,

The benefits of linen and sunscreen

And reported booming interest in

The great British al fresco staycation.

 

The official announcements came later

As the sun beat the ground into a crisp

Shell, a fossil of the fertile crust;

Cracks widening, the plants withering,

Dying where they stood, and water, water,

Nowhere it used to be: not in the rivers

Clogged with filth - the final dividend

Of fleeing, fat cat chief executives –

Not in the sky, nor in the reservoirs

Where mud showed like receding gums,

Nor in the towns where lawns were pale as straw –

‘Gardeners’ World’ was cancelled right away –

Nor always in the homes where hosepipe bans

Became rationing then long standpipe queues.

 

At night, the heat came like Grendel, swelling

From the dark corners to stifle the old.

The streets were filled with the sleepless, staring

Blankly out as if the graves had opened.

 

If we ignore the preceding thirty,

This year was truly unprecedented.

Some blamed it on a casual cigarette,

Flicked from the window of a speeding car,

Others on the deliberate matches

Of disaffected youth or arsonists,

From anarchists to clumsy barbecues,

All meeting in the tinder of dried grass.

 

It was not just a fire, nor even a blaze,

Although both words were always in the air

Like undescended sparks, but it became

The Burn, a name that spoke of the wounding

Of the land, the searing of its skin.

What began as a thin red line, a front,

Gripped the brown and yellow acres, leaping

Over breaks and fallow strips, bulging

A TV Rorschach blot of ash and fear.

The earth looked like the surface of the sun

In a child’s picture book, a corona

Of flames rising and consuming the trees,

Reducing their patient scaffolds to stumps

And flowing across the no-man’s land

Of brittle wheat and early July stubble.

 

Whipped by a capricious wind, the flames

Turned on Norwich, sending spies, encircling

The city with Boudicca’s red riot,

Bringing brick and stone to blackened dust,

Leaving pylons mangled in the fields

And firefighters spent and in retreat.

 

Powerless, people packed their lives in bags.

Lines of cars and buses filled the roads,

Slowly evacuating citizens

West and north towards the higher ground

And tented camps on military bases.

Numbers grew en route as tributaries

Fed in from Swaffham, Dereham, Diss and Holt,

Wherever burning ruin held its sway.

 

The country shrank as moors and parks erupted,

The scorched earth policy too limited

And infrastructure melting in the heat,

Like a sadly unattended ice-cream.

And all too soon, the beacons we had built

Became the pyres of all that we had made.

 

Sometimes, sitting in the incessant wind

That drags the dust across the Eastern Plains

To where the land is sinking day by day,

I cough into my mask and remember

That this is the time of austerity,

The hard years before the recovery,

And it is as if the dimpling Wensum’s

Blue meanders never existed.

 

July 2026




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