A Firefighter's Thoughts

• Chantal Davisworth, Grade 12
• Poetry
• 2013

Your gut twists in anticipation as you race towards the fireground; sirens piercing the night, red and blue lights dancing off the tall, smoldering trees.

You take everything in as you drive through the quiet streets – the smell of smoke lingering in the forest; the charcoaled trees; the fallen powerlines lying in the burnt ground.

As you become closer and closer to what took the brunt of it all, you pray that your training and level-head will kick in. But nothing has prepared you for what you see.
You witness house after house burnt to the ground – crumbled bricks and remnants of life scattered where a beautiful home once stood.

Nobody is around. There is no life, yet as you navigate through the devastation you imagine the family that once lived there. Suddenly things piece together. You imagine kids, a young boy and his little sister, laughing as they play on their yellow swing-set. Their dad reads the local paper just meters away from where his kids play as their mum makes peanut butter sandwiches for her hungry kids – glancing up now and then to make sure everything’s ok.

Just as suddenly the tranquil setting vanishes, only to be replaced by the cruel reality. The yellow swing-set is replaced with a twisted mess of charred metal – its plastic seats melted into an undistinguishable blend of blacks and greys. The wooden seat the kids’ dad was sitting on becomes a pile of ash with fragments of charcoaled wood poking out – almost as if to escape the cruelness of loss. The window mum once looked out of to check on her kids is shattered – creating an ugly scar on the only standing wall on the property – like a flaw in beauty, foreshadowing a doubt in hope.

Eventually you become almost immune to the devastation engulfing the area. You tune out the horrific mess before you - locking it away for later in attempt to accomplish your task.

You see home after home destroyed. The agony of loss wells up inside you, threatening to be released like a heavy rain – something that you know won’t come because you checked the spot forecast before you left, but you pray anyway.

Eventually your mood lightens. You see the lucky people; the ones with their homes still standing, the ones who didn’t lose a loved one.

You realise how unfair life is. You see firsthand that no amount of preparation can stop a disaster on its raging path. What does it take to be that one out of a hundred? - That one who loses everything when nobody else does.

Just when you feel you can’t go on any further - the emotional and physical pain unbearable – the sun rises and the birds begin to chirp. Life is restored – not completely, but the beginnings on new life are prominent. The early morning sunlight bathes the ruins and charred earth in a beautiful, promising glow. Hope is restored. Hope for a new life. Hope that all will be resilient.

You suddenly know that everything will be ok.