We always knew
not to play with fire.
But how could a tiny bright spot
on a gum leaf hurt?
- a tiny bright spot
the size of a nail-head,
poised with a steady child-hand
(remember the salt-sweet, tadpole smell?)...
held steady until a cobweb of smoke
unravelled from the grey leather of the leaf-
a splinter of flame now embedded,
turning leaf to cancer in a single black second.

Had we dropped the leaf,
let it spin or drift
onto the litter at our feet,
who can say how quickly
a single cell of combustion
might have spread?
metastasizing in a second,
burrowing underneath
the sickles and segments of grey-green drab
to emerge
as a telling wisp,
a pothead stink,
amongst the sticks?

And then- a minute whoosh-
a popping of the still and pregnant air-
the breaking of the seal of silence-
a tiny whoosh and crackle,
and suddenly a kite-string of blue rags
lifts up from leaves and sticks and pods;
a rope of orange rags
lifts like a dropped washing-line
into the waiting space,

and the afternoon ignites
with a thousand washing-lines
loaded with orange nylon curtains
and that thready unravelling
of the blue above the trees
is suddenly a billowing parachute
of terrible grey-
and no longer silk,
but now bombazine, now hessian-
heavy and poisoned and suffocating.

And it is suddenly too late, my dearest,
too late!
And all along, we knew the truth
of what we had been taught so many years before-
that we mustn't play with fire.

But, oh! how hypnotizing
that tiny focused beam.