Muirburn

My father weighed a little less than at birth. 
I carried him in both hands to the pines
as October brought the burning season.
When I unscrewed the urn, bone-chaff and grit
streamed out. A smell of gunpowder.
I remembered the sulphur hiss of the match – 
how he taught me to breathe on the steeple of logs
until the kindling caught and flames quickened.
That night, in sleep, I saw the forest clearing
by the moor’s edge, and the ring of his ashes. 
A skirl of smoke began to rise – 
bracken curling, a fume of blaeberry leaves. 
Ants broke their ranks, scattering, fleeing,
and a moth spun ahead of the fire-wind.
I took the path over the heath at a run.
A voice at my shoulder said, ‘You’ll inherit fire.’
And through the smoke I glimpsed a line of figures
on the hillside, beating and beating the heather
as the fire-front roared towards them.
A volley of shouts: ‘Keep the wind at your back!’
My grandmother threshing with a fire-broom, 
Dad hacking a firebreak. My stillborn brother, now grown, 
sprinting for the hollow where the spring once flowed, 
the whole hill flaring in the updraft.
And there: a girl, running for the riverside – 
she wore my face, the shade of ash.