by Heather Kaufmann
Manning Provincial Park, BC, July 2021 Luke 3:7-17
Dust billows at our every step our finger pads and nostrils lined with the grit of it as we wend our way through alpine undergrowth towards the First Brothers’ peak.
Things are not as they should be: the grass gone coarse and sharp as wire the horizon a haze of smoke threatening to choke our lungs in past neglect.
Close to the summit now a voice ahead calls “fire” and we run to the cliff’s edge, see an ashen cloud now rising over the next ridge, its tips bone-white against unnatural blue.
Bright beacons flare erratic at its base and a plane flies like a thirsting mosquito in and out of the swelling mass of cloud: there is no baptism big enough for this unquenchable flame.
And will there be a bigger baptism a greater flame whose crucible earth will birth a fruit more ripe and red than the brightest blaze we’ve yet to know?
Here (now) we pray for rain.
Heather Kaufmann is a New England native, poet, and graduate student of theology in Vancouver, BC. Her recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Ekstasis, CRUX, Christian Century, and Fathom.
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