Poetry: Wild Fire

BBC In The Studio

Listen here from 22nd September 2026 »

In December 2024, the Scottish poet Leonie Charlton’s house burned to the ground. From that moment, Leonie was obsessed with fire. She saw it everywhere, writing about and mulling over the acute experience of watching everything she and her family had ever owned go up in flames. In early summer this year, Leonie set off through the ruggedly wild and beautiful landscape of the West Coast of Scotland to write a new poem about fire for her forthcoming collection Deerlands. But, within days, the thousands of wildfires across the world began to take hold, reaching into Scotland too. 

This is a programme about a poet responding to a personal calamity just at the moment it becomes a global calamity. 

Presented by Antonia Quirke.

 

Wild Fire

Here too are under-tangles of gorse, forgotten forests, wolf sex.
Here too are cubs dragged into the slaughtering light.
Here too the fleeting cool cast by clouds.
Here too the flames that burn bluest.
Here too councils of butterflies on hot summits.
Here too a woman flanked by horseflies at the Cailleach’s well,
here too wishes witnessed by Schiehallion and Beinn Dorain.

Here too heat haze dripping down skylines.
Here too evaporation and spilt rock.
Here too lightning strikes and scars.
Here too starved sphagnum and shrinking conversation,
a landscape howling questions of dominion:
what of drought, flood, fire; what of the bees;
what of turning all purpose to the future.

Here too all that lives on imagination’s tongue
meaning the textures of loss,
love that lands with ashes after rain.
Meaning moths returning to the black,
all that their antennae grasp.
Meaning the unnumbered paths deer remake,
the holes of light things disappear into,

the embers of lack and missing missing missing,
meaning all that the flames have consumed.
Meaning desires kindling in the aftermath,
transforming deaths into these coming days,
impalpable futures,
meaning birds seeking their way home,
meaning trusting that what needs to rise will rise,

meaning that to simplify and purify are hymns
to goddesses and gods, to adders and roots and seeds salvaged
from the yellow melancholy of smoke,
meaning the song of blue widening out and up
into whatever the night already knows
of the heart’s capacity 
to absorb its own dark weight in flames.

 

Acknowledgments:
‘what of turning all purpose to the future’ is adapted from Alan Riach’s translation of Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s poem ‘Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain’/’Praise of Ben Dorain’
‘all that lives on imagination’s tongue’ is adapted from Denise Levertov’s poem ‘Taste and See’
Thank you to the following people for their editorial support: Juliet Anthill, Clare Shaw, Simon Stanley, Rachel Connor and Shâo-Lan Yuen.