Nightfall at Timanfaya

Nightfall at Timanfaya

I watch night climb   
the fire mountains around me - 
the ash slopes and cinder cones 
bury their faces in darkness
and below, lava fields and palisades 

pucker in badlands
a last flutter-dash 

across their basaltic sheen

their depth is alien to me -
these serious and mute fire mountains are not mine
- only the names:

Quemada, Maza, Maria Hernández, Encantada
feel vaguely homely – 

almost like exotic relatives I've never met 

but for my parents’ memory

the yellow eagle calls high above me
then a rustle as the wind tangles itself in rocky crevice traps
the black obsidian of a wounded earth –  
I am soon gone, my life hidden again –  

but the fire mountains draw deep, back to the source

in this darkness there is no pretence, at least not much
here the scale is another -

huge, deep and foreign

- requiring different cartography 

and unworldly maps -

a growing stride:
thick, angular and dark

- the fire mountains hum their black mass to El Diablo