Flare-Up – a poem by Dan Campion

Flare-Up

To dream of a volcano—hold your joke—
is not so bad. By reckless driving, we
outran the pyroclastic flow, the smoke,
the falling flaming rock and ash. The key
to such a dream is always poetry.
The underworld, the hectic flight, the air
a churning bioluminescent sea
are, for a rhapsode, a routine affair.
Take Dante’s reeking hellfire’s reddish glare:
What is it but a flare-up from the deep,
and his descent the key to it, right there
for anyone to see, awake, asleep—
or in that zone between, poised as Pompeii
to feel the mountain breathe upon its clay?

Dan Campion is the author of Calypso (1981), The Mirror Test (2024), A Playbill for Sunset (2022), and Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995) and is a co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981, 2nd ed. 1998, 3rd ed. 2019). Dan’s poetry has appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Able Muse, Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, THINK, and many other magazines.