Carbon Cycle

1

Long before
Our meticulous schemes
Went up in smoke,
We were residue:
The stars’ dry dust.

Burned already.

At our feet, charred remains
Rub marks across another kind of page,
Reticulated, blackened wood,
Fired and fissured, friable to the touch,
The hatching of an image,
Or, perhaps, a memory.

The ashes were cold
By the time we woke;

Then, a hundred million suns
Until we scratched even a line on a stone
Or discovered combustion for ourselves.

Now we have cinders in our veins
And call it blood:
The beat of our life,
Its ebb and flow.

We are made from rubble and reduction.
What was, is still in us,
The scattered light of the heavens
Broken down to carbon black.

Accidents of energy made us.

Creation and destruction,
The fires that fuelled our works
Have laid them waste.

The door, incinerated, buckled in its frame,
Fragmented blocks, oddly regular,
Grim, black crayons, fitting the span of a hand.
And the dust of it, everywhere,
Breathed in behind the smoke,
Settling like a lightless snow
On familiar floors and stairwells.

Lamp black. Thermal black. Furnace black.

That desaturated place, all colour sucked out,
Embraced the names of pigments
Now lying at our feet.


2

Trees are the earth reaching out to heaven.
They steal sunlight from the sky
And lay it down with their bones
Beneath the forest floor.

All that building: wooden veins and limbs,
Trunks to hold up leaves to the energy falling,
While deep roots stretch out, shoring timber
Against wind-throw and storm.

Every tree is prey to time
Whose invisible talons creep into the endless reaching
And bring it crashing to the ground.
Even standing deadwood falls at last
To where burial is a black eternity.

Locked inside, compressing
Under the weight of successive generations
Imprisoned sun, carbon in the darkness,
Life turned to stone, a coiled spring,
Energy shackled and bound,
Waiting to be set free.

3

The stars, seen though open roof beams
And wisps of aimless smoke,
Were shining as still as a frosted sky
White upon another black,
Light where otherwise
Light is absent.

Gather up the soot and grit,
Hold the scorched-wood blocks,
Take all these things away from here
So here can be remembered.

Cross-hatch, scrawl, delineate,
Recast an image on the page
From reformed remnants of smoke
From what is left when smoke recedes.
All the lost schemes and dreams are there
Recorded in these crumbs and pieces.

Carbon crayons paper, darkens it
Or white shines through in shades and tints.
Creation, and our imagination,
Transforms destruction,
Makes one illusion from the debris of another.
Even though, we too, are scratches on a surface:
Random marks of dust and burning.

 © BH 2014

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The Glasgow Art School fire last year was a huge tragedy. An iconic building, a place of immense creativity, never mind that I've family connections to it, the loss was staggering. The resilience that followed, though, was breathtaking. The phoenix really did rise from the ashes: the Phoenix Bursaries, to help rebuild lost portfolios; the appreciation of the knowledge to be gained from the ruins; the architectural secrets hidden behind walls since the beginning. 

This poem arose from hearing about Melissa Maloco's project to create artworks using the charred remains. That definitely appealed to my sense of a kind of artistic Law of Conservation where nothing is ever destroyed, only changed and embedded in whatever newness regrows in time to come. The works are called Negotiation of Space (A Door Opening and Closing) - see below.

Negotiations of Space (A Door Opening and Closing), 2014,
Artists paper, Carbon dust, Exhibition View