As One Fire Consumes Another by John Sibley Williams

Wow! This book is a chronicle of human’s humanity and inhumanity. It’s always looking sideways at the ruin humans do to each other, making that damage beyond and other, strange in a way it should be. There’s so much beauty and love in these poems too. They’re poems to get lost into, rich and powerful. Buy here.

From “When instinct matures into will,”

. . . Bit by bit the bomb steals what no- / body has enough of to offer; offer / them everything, I tell my daughter. / When they come, revert to violence / without fury. Show your teeth, bite / down, & if you’re full, release them / back to the wild, without mercy.

From “Another Story That Ends in Cathedral”

We stopped being birds for days / after they fell. An unimaginable / sight: skies emptied of planes and / dreams, of our ownerships. Empty as / the space between our hands. At / least we remembered to love what / goes as much as what comes. Mother / had begonias and a nation growing in / her back then. My daughter was a / decade unborn. Suddenly, a god for / every thirsty mouth, and I think I / remembered to love them all / equally, and forever. . . .

From “Lesser Beasts”

. . . Hunting / beneath the kitchen table for some- / thing to tame may mean I’ll have to / rope together my father’s legs and / brand him, one day. And maybe / that’s okay. Animaling everything / within reach may just be a part of our / nature. One could spend a lifetime / divorcing constellations from bull, / from ram, eagle, goat; from hunter / and hunted. I’m down here under an / old oak table making little beasts of / morning. The morning is crying. / Father, why is the morning still crying?