By Diana woodcock

Surely the pilgrim can feel it here,
heaven under one’s feet –
olivine and lava flows –
as well as over our heads,*
so many rainbows,

the presence and power of
active volcanoes – fire and
molten lava, each eruption
a passage, beauty of the earth
giving birth. In their presence,

one’s thoughts turn to spirit
and transendence, to downward
flow (lava) and rock uplift (the split
ground) – Earth still being
created, volcanoes signifying

the totality of nature’s process.
If one would look directly
into essential nature, let her
stare down into the caldera,
descend into a crater and hike

across a hardened lava lake,
then enter a cave into which lava
flowed five hundred years ago.
Finally climb to the top
of a cinder cone to see once

and for all how everything
eventually flows back into the sea,
and to consider that maybe
it wouldn’t be a tragedy –
wouldn’t be the worst way to go –

to be buried alive
under a lava flow,
becoming at last
all flame beneath
the fiery rain.

*Henry David Thoreau

Diana Woodcock has authored seven chapbooks and five poetry collections, most recently Holy Sparks (2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award finalist) and Facing Aridity (2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature finalist). Recipient of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award, the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women and three Pushcart Prize nominations, she teaches at VCUarts Qatar.