I am sure that we are not in love any more,
but I am always thinking about that day
with the lightning. Something about illumination,
a quote I once read about women who
wear their power. We could have done anything
with that lightning; what did we think
we could learn from burning down
the house we were trying to live in? This is
not a rhetorical question. I really want to know.

The answer I come up with is always the same:
‘we were young and we thought fire was beautiful.’
It is not a very good answer. We were restless,
we wanted ashes to rise from. We just didn’t
think that healing would take so long.

It’s true: it was a house, not an empire, that we
burnt down. We knew that; that’s why we didn’t think
it was important. We thought the history books
would forget. We didn’t know that when I grew up
I would go on to write about our dirty, destructive
history. We didn’t know that poetry books 
could also be history books. 

What else is there for me to do? I was inside that house
when it burnt down. I never told you that part.
You looked so much more beautiful on the other
side of us. Yes, you looked so good framed in all
that soot and swirling smoke that I just bit my tongue
and stayed down here in the dark, writing poems 
about us out of blood and ash and anger.