Fire In the Morning

A while back, we woke up to the sounds of sirens. When we walked outside and stood in our front lawn, we saw a black tower of thick, heavy, smoke rising up from a nearby neighborhood. Ironically, it was a beautiful morning. The sky wasn't quite ripe and still held the colors of twilight. I stood in silence with my husband and watched helplessly. Later that morning, I wrote this:

Barking dogs mingled with wailing cries,
As thick black smoke poured into the dawn.
The night blooming vine, the deepest purple,
Like the jeweled slipper of an Egyptian queen,
Lay on the ground, fragile but unaware.
Voices called out, directions in a robotic tongue,
And the smoke billowed up, soft as a cloud,
But black as night.
The morning springs eternal until everything
You own is destroyed.
We are guaranteed nothing.