Age of fire
Don’t let it bring you down.
It’s not the smoke
from funeral pyres,
not crematorium deposit
on childhood games,
not another city burning,
not here, not tonight
though someone whispers
all fires are the fire.
It’s not oil flares
at the refinery,
not a red dwarf
tracked from the observatory,
not the sfumato
of Last Judgements;
just another humdrum done
day rolled to the furnace
in best sunset pinks and blues,
just another deathbed conversion
to the quattrocento.
Then there’s black space
and mouthfuls from our flask,
each one a five minutes’ heartbeat;
all fires the stolen fire
I think, as we walk
under the lamps
towards our own blaze.
About this poem
This poem was included in the Best of the Best Scottish Poems, published in 2019. To mark the fifteenth anniversary of our annual online anthology Best Scottish Poems, the Library invited broadcaster, journalist and author James Naughtie to edit a ‘Best of the Best’ drawn from each of the annual editions of Best Scottish Poems.
Editor’s comment:
Alasdair Paterson plays with the idea of fire, in all the ways it springs up around us (even in the crematorium…) and, of course, inside us. He says this is about picking up themes of the Homeric worlds. His achievement is to make it seem something that flickers and burns in the here-and-now.
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2014. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2014 was Roderick Watson.
Author’s note:
‘Age of fire’ is one of a dozen Age of… poems that constitute the sequence Homerics, which is in turn one of the sections of my most recent collection Elsewhere or Thereabouts. The idea was to engage with some of the characteristic themes of the Homeric world, though not confined in context to ancient times. ‘Age of fire’, specifically, is informed by the writings of Heraclitus on the processes of change in the universe, of which fire was the major agent and symbol, and also by his idea of the fundamental unity of all things. So the cosmic links to, and is indivisible from, the personal. There are also a number of personal fire-related memories involved, including playing football downwind of Leith Crematorium!
