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- Lightning cracked across the sky like veins on the back of your hand.
- It reached a fiery finger out as if in reprimand
- And torched a crippled cottonwood that leaned against the sky
- While grass and sagebrush hunkered down that hellish hot July.
- The cottonwood exploded! And shot its flaming seeds
- Like comets into kerosene, igniting all the weeds.
- The air was thick as dog’s breath when the fire’s feet hit the ground.
- It licked its pyrogenic lips and then it looked around.
- The prairie lay defenseless in the pathway of the beast.
- It seemed to search the further hills and pointed to the east,
- Then charged! Like some blind arsonist, some heathen hell on wheels
- With its felonious companion, the wind, hot on its heels.
- The varmints ran like lemmings in the shadow of the flame
- While high above a red tailed hawk flew circles, taking aim.
- He spied a frazzled prairie dog and banked into a dive
- But the stoker saw him comin’ and fried ‘em both alive!
- It slid across the surface like a molten oil slick.
- It ran down prey and predator...the quiet and the quick.
- The killdeer couldn’t trick it, it was cinders in a flash.
- The bones of all who faced it soon lay smoking in the ash.
- The antelope and cricket, the rattlesnake and bee,
- The butterfly and badger, the coyote and the flea.
- It was faster than the rabbit, faster than the fawn,
- They danced inside the dragon’s mouth like puppets...then were gone.
- It offered up no quarter and burned for seven days.
- A hundred thousand acres were consumed within the blaze.
- Brave men came out to kill it, cutting trail after trail
- But it jumped their puny firebreaks and scattered ‘em like quail.
- It was ugly from a distance and uglier up close
- So said the men who saw the greasy belly of the ghost.
- It made‘m cry for mama. Melted tracks on D-8 Cats.
- It sucked the sweat right off of their backs and broke their thermostats.
- It was hotter than a burning brake, heavy as a train,
- It was louder than the nightmare screams of Abel’s brother, Cain.
- It was war with nature’s fury unleashed upon the land
- Uncontrollable, enormous, it held the upper hand.
- The men retrenched repeatedly, continuously bested
- Then finally on the seventh day, like Genesis, it rested.
- The black-faced fire fighters stared, unable to believe.
- They watched the little wisps of smoke, mistrusting their reprieve.
- They knew they hadn’t beaten it. They knew beyond a doubt.
- Though News Break told it different, they knew it just went out.
- Must’ve tired of devastation, grew jaded to the fame.
- Simply bored to death of holocaust and walked out of the game.
- You can tell yourself...that’s crazy. Fire’s not a living thing.
- It’s only chance combustion, there’s no malice in the sting.
- You can go to sleep unworried, knowing man is in control,
- That these little freaks of nature have no evil in their soul.
- But rest assured it’s out there and the powder’s always primed
- And it will be back, you know it...it’s only biding time
- ‘Til the range turns into kindling and the grass turns into thatch
- And a fallen angel tosses out a solitary match.
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