This week was tough. At the very last minute I was inspired to write by a wildfire that I witnessed in the south of Spain last week. Night was falling and I saw the flames beginning to take hold of the vegetation. It was a windy night, the wind as you would expect coming off the sea and driving the fire a little bit further away from where I was, close to the beach. I watched as the flames grew higher and consumed what I thought was quite a large amount of land. Talking to other people, people who lived in the area, they told me that some years ago wildfire had consumed a huge amount of land between Malaga and Marbella. Indeed one of the people I spoke to had photos of the fire, taken at night. The flames were truly terrifying, and yet the vegetation had regrown and my question was how? So I’ve spent some time trying to express this as a riddle haiku:
a miracle?
after the wildfire
a green shoot
a first shoot
visible in the ash
how do you grow?
the fire
destroys all before it
and yet – a seed
I’m still working on them. I think I have something, a seed of an idea that might come to something in the future.
