On a deep black Thursday morning
Long before the day was dawning
There’s a crackling flicker of flame
Bursting from pitch dark horizons
A distant building was burning
The flickering shape of a church -
Perhaps a school - in orange bright
Dancing cutouts kept reforming
Far away burning mysteries
Make my morning commute slightly
Distracted and defocussed but
More dramatic than usual
By the time I could work out where
The flames that I could see leaping
From the hilltops might be raging
I was waiting at traffic lights
The fire engines were already
Overtaking – Blue lit, silent
Racing through enlightened morning
In unexpected directions
A sense of guilt nibbles away
Should I have dialed 999?
When others obviously had
To explain what I’d seen somewhere
I can't imagine that a call
Saying "There's a fire somewhere
Along a direct line between
Mellor and the city centre…”
“…Somewhere along those nine miles
A building is burning it seems!”
Would have helped the emergency
Services a great deal, though
I kept going – as did the flames
Far further away than I thought
Any call that I might have made
Would have been utterly useless
I sat in some traffic later
In Romiley - a huge orange
Light bursting over to my right
Beyond where the Cricket Club lies
Later I check social websites
“Romiley” and “Fire” I type
Misinformation abounding
Around old halls and paper mills
Four, six or seventeen tenders
Attending the great inferno
Firemen turning up everywhere
Beating off swooning girls with sticks
Turned out that the conflagration
Was a housing development
Near complete - now utterly gone
Happily the Old Hall still stands
Stories continue to smoulder
Arson incident suspected
Chimneys still have to be pulled down
Journo sorry she lacked make-up
Martin
A W Holmes, October 2016
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