Around the Greening Campfire

 

Around the Greening Campfire

(“But God has shown me that I must not call any person common or unclean.” Acts 10:28b)

Dreams come cleaner around the greening campfire;
splayed out in a dozen sleeping bags, our heads a ring around
the waning embers
and our legs the rays of a star being born.

We told our stories round-robin, past midnight till dawn.
Some of us knew each other since childhood,
some we had met only hours ago.
Some were impatient to sleep with day-sting in their eyes,
the rest insisted the night couldn’t end until we saw the sunrise.

All we knew was this moment would never come again;
these twelve never gathered, this fire a different color on
another planet or
another day.
We were attached to each other by the web of our voices,
the stories a silken thread stitching us like a firefly’s smoking jacket.

Some of us had seen the aurora borealis just the night before,
and swore
God was speaking on the mountain trail we snuck upon
well after curfew. We smoked cigarettes and held them in
the air like votive candles.

But the breathing fire that was our center; the mass that was
equidistant from each of us seemed touchable that night (though
none of us thought to hold an ember in our hand.) We were
baby birds learning each other’s languages, a tired menagerie
in the Sierra Nevadas, just a handful of whelps from the East Bay.

We have flared from there in every direction, as different as
we were the same that night. But the threads still contain us,
the night still calls us, and the stories are written upon the sky
in the hearts of stars that hid our chatter and occasional tears
in eternal vaults. No one is ever unmet.