We Thought We Had Fire Figured Out

[vagabond]

We Thought We Had Fire Figured Out


We thought we had fire figured out:
a spark to some tinder
sets flame to dry kindling
then logs start to catch and to burn.
A bit of a process
but one any novice can learn.
So with that, we had fire figured out.

But it turns out not all wood’s the same:
some’s wet and some’s poison
and when you mix charcoal
with sulfur and saltpeter
if you’re not careful it blows up the house.
But with time and experiment
lots of burnt fingers (and not a few bodies)
once more we had fire figured out.

Then it turned out by learning
of lights without burning
exciting new processes grew ~
though at first those who knew them were few:
with explosives for tinder
plutonium kindling
deuterium standing in lightly for wood
new fires can toast cities
(it’s millions of pities)
but now we’ve got fire figured out!

Certain egg-headed persons propose
that space is not empty but full
of vacu-um energy filling the universe
full of potential
like wood or black charcoal
or even deuterium, just not as rare.
These intelligent people don’t care
if experiments find there’s a spark
that wants striking, or tinder
or kindling for catching
to set all Creation alight.
Would anyone try it?  They might.
And then we’ll have fire figured out.

The other poem for this title would be a sonnet...

nice history of humans and fire from stone-age to the 20+ centuries!

but why split the egg-heads off the collective "we" from the first three stanzas, they´re part of humanity as well (and the responsability is in some way shared because research is funded, laws allow it, people hope for advantageous uses and so on), and their experimenting with fire like all others cause damage, just the scale differs.