Emergency Service (unsuccessful entry for the National Poetry Prize)
I
Hello, my name’s Jo, I’m a
firefighter.
My job normally involves two main
things:
first, I give advice and help to
people
about fire hazards and smoke
detectors
and how to stay safe in day-to-day
life.
Happily this takes up most of my
time.
The second part starts as soon as the
bell rings:
it means there’s some sort of
emergency.
You never know. Could be a fire. Could be
someone stuck in a lift; could be
someone
impaled on a fence. Could be an awful
motorway pile up with multiple
deaths.
II
Last night, though, we had to deal
with something new:
a huge and sprawling house was
alight.
It seemed at first sight like a
regular fire,
but we realised quite quickly that something
was not right.
Despite the heat and smoke and flames
no-one was outside. It was very strange. Usually people are frightened and they run
to congregate on lawns and driveways;
or they might get as far
as the end of the street, somewhere
with some light, where they can see
the height of the flames and search
for the reassuring gaze
of a bright white knight
or – preferably – someone who has
come to fight the fire.
III
But everyone was still inside. They were
gathered around luminous screens,
they were
dressed as unicorns and astronauts,
they were
praying for riches and hoping for
numbers and
blindly believing in digital deceits,
they were transfixed by faeries
and trolls and rainbow babies and fictional
lifestyles,
they hithered and thithered with
baubles and froth, their trinkets and
keyboards like
props for their denial, they ran
around and sat still, numb
in a frenzy of celebrity as they
blithely ignored
that their house was on fire.
IV
What are they doing? I don’t understand.
What are we doing? I don’t understand.
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