So I lit us both on fire | Work from ArtsFest 2023
ArtsFest is a teens-only program where we celebrate all forms of creation and create space for campers to pursue the art forms of their choice. One of the 2023 concentrations was writing, where camper Margot P both wrote and performed the following two poems:
Searching for Dragons and Absolutes.
Searching for Dragons
My most foolish folly and my strangest strife
I’ve been searching for dragons my entire life
In vast dusty kingdoms underneath my porch
In mica-flecked stones that shine in the sun’s torch
In the gilded forsythia tunnel of briar
In the skeletal arbor where I thought I saw fire
In the swimming pool pipe I know leads to abyss
And anywhere else I would lurk if not missed
Though it’s stupid, some say, to expect to see stories
To dwell for too deep on mythology’s glories
There’s a negative space with a quite toothy grin
The animal kingdom’s perpetual phantom limb
So put me in danger of gaping mauve maws
The engulfing peril of unhinging jaws
And let me be wary of unblinking eyes
That shine in the darkness like strange fireflies
Give me a creature flown back from afar
That sparks like an earthquake and breathes like a star
Cloaked in tempered embers, in beetles and dust
And crowned in a keratin wreath made of rust
I would sacrifice princesses, warriors, jewels
For a massive reptile with lava for drool
But alas, alack, I find no flying lizards
No serpentine stomachs with incendiary gizzards
So why must I insist on speaking of things
That row through the clouds on membranous wings
I think that perhaps to a snaggle-toothed fool
Who once could run as fast on four legs as two
Who hid inside cabinets and couldn’t speak right
Dragons may always seem kinder than knights
Absolutes
I come from someplace cold
A silver sunken star, a hard knife shard
encased in a mist weathered shell
But one day, you and I clawed each other out of that frigid mirror, that stygian river
And I finally saw
That you have a mind like an opalized ammonite spirals within iridescent spirals all the way down
to where something shines at the bottom
deeper than I can fathom
And I tried to hold on tight, but you
said my hands were cold
So I lit us both on fire just to feel a little warmer
But I forgot that the flame might
Gutter us in the night
And fold us backwards into a frost-feathered cataract
Arrested in time and space
Torpor-touched, I dreamed
I found you at an autumnal carousel
A screaming, pinwheeling implosion
Of heat and light
A chaos that looked right
And you grabbed me by my ankles to stop me
From flying like a sky-starved starling
Into that incandescent void
Where I recognized what might be my reflection
When we woke
I stole fragments of your life
To feed to the furnace that I hide
Under my floor
So that tomorrow, or in a thousand years
When you’ve buried all your flaws
I can resurrect that rainbow pyre
And grin and live well while on fire
To show it doesn’t matter if I’m told
That I came from someplace cold
Margot has been coming to Stomping Ground since 2016. This year, they were part of the Writer’s Guild and joined both staff and campers in creating the 2023 Literary Zine.
