POETRY / Spring 2026 Literary Series
Jeannette de Beauvoir wrote a lot of bad, self-referential, derivative, and overly dramatic poetry in her teens—and then didn’t return to the genre for thirty years, during which she wrote novels instead (that were a lot less self-referential, derivative, etc.). Her poems are generally somewhat bleaker than her murder mysteries. Some people find that odd.
https://www.jeannettedebeauvoir.com/
This poem was previously published in the Looking-Glass Review for Earth Day.
Victoria, 2019-2020: Devastating wildfires blaze across southeastern Australia as a result of a prolonged heat wave and drought created by climate change.
Birds dropping out of the sky: burning,
and dropping out of the sky. Stars gone,
sun gone, nothing but thick darkness and fear:
ghosts wander dangerously in the smoke.
Dread has its own clarity, its own sharp edges—
no-one is the same having felt it. Too late to leave,
roads closed, flight cut off, people huddled together
close to water. The wind is about to shift.
Salvation is a crop-duster, a tanker truck, an island.
Escape no longer somewhere out there but only
anywhere the flames cannot go. Hands blindly
grasping, voices murmuring prayers, then
lightning flashing, bursts of brightness: lightning
but with no storm—fire-generated, a singular thing,
it crackles. By morning, Mallacoota has no power
under skies as black and dark as midnight;
by noon, fire trucks form rings around those trapped
to protect them from flames coming closer and faster.
Told to go into the water, any water, if the sirens wail
a warning. Most people will never know
how loud a fire is. It howls and screams, a voice almost
human. Some say it sounds like a freight train; others,
the voice of a dragon, the sound of a world ending
in pain. Piercing strobes of flashing lights
from emergency vehicles glitter-reflecting houses in ruins,
ashes of past lifetimes gone should anyone be left here
to mourn over them: a garden, a wall, a shop, burning,
leaving no more time to even dream
of what might be, too late for finding love, or learning
a new language, or following a vision cherished back
when sweet sunset days drifted into starry nights and life
was nothing but promise. Promises burn.
Visions burn. People burn. A heating world made manifest
in a desperate fire-breathing earth, in wild bushfires
that devour everything, and one day we’ll look back
and say we never took the time
to say good-bye to the koalas.Contributor’s Note
Fire Breathing came out of a news report I heard on NPR back during the Victoria fires; one of the reporters said the intensity of the heat was such that it was creating its own weather systems, even killing birds in flight. That horrified me so much that I went online to learn more, and became even more horrified by everything I read. I felt compelled to mark the moment, because we all forget so quickly and so easily. This is what we are doing—to the earth, to its creatures, to ourselves.