Burnin’ Sun
Well, the frostbitten air pressed low near the earth
While the turbulent skies kept whipping icy wind
Against the flesh of my face
Pinching a pen with finger joints frozen in place
Ink, sputtering like a defective mower riding back
And forth across the page
Hesitation gives way to solitude as the
Spirit of the moment
Seeps in, seeps in
Raising my eyes above the paper,
The burnin’ sun
Streams
The late 1970s saw some of the coldest winters ever recorded in the Midwest. The Ohio River itself froze deep enough to walk across from Cincinnati to Kentucky. We had days and weeks of bone-chilling temperatures, often below zero without counting the wind chill. Due to so many days of called-off school, we had free time to adjust ourselves to the freezing cold through sled riding, ice skating and generally running up and down the frozen world.
When I was not hanging out with the brothers, I kept with up with my habit of hiking alone in the pastures surrounding our suburban neighborhood. One time in particular, I ventured out with my sketchbook in hand to record thoughts and images that came from the winter landscape. I was about 17 at the time and hiking alone was a thing I did. I started a poem out in the cold which I later entitled “Burnin' Sun”. Burnin' is basically about a young person who moves with a kind of abandonment into life, like marching out and right into the face of an environmental calamity. He moves instinctively towards the storm because the experience itself is so much more important than life or limb.
The foolishness of this episode reminded me of the story “To Build a Fire” by Jack London. Here the protagonist, a new-comer to the Alaskan Klondike, ultimately dies in a winter storm because he wasn't able to build a fire to keep from freezing to death. Instead of scratching matches, the poet character, me, is trying to build a composition by scratching pen against paper. Like London’s Klondike dude, the fingers of the poet also seemed to be turning into icicles. Klondike dude’s first fire was clumsily made and got snuffed out. The poet guy became incapable of controlling his pen across the paper notebook. Klondike froze to death like the little match girl, in a twilight dream state of other-worldly joy and expectancy. The poet pulled back from the brink of this and suffered his project to be finished later--with hands thawed in the warmth of home and family.
Nobody else knew what I had been through that afternoon. I lost my battle with the cold but managed to save both my fingers and the vision I had. It was something of a vision of life as exceedingly fragile and precious. I could not build a fire of meaningful verses out there in raw elements. That task died in the frozen fields; but the experience of looking up from my failed attempt burned in me. I saw the sun streaming like liquid in the sky above, burning like lava, and it touched me, this burning sun, an unexpected outcome that singed my mind and burned the outer edges of my heart forever. The sting and bitterness of broken ink scratches on brittle paper, just out there beyond the neighborhood, branded in me a consciousness way out of proportion to the puny sense of self I had come there with. And the experience lingers on.
Since that time, my life has often been a struggle for meaning. I find myself frozen in my habits and in my lack of understanding. I still live in something like herd-consciousness, (even if it is generally a friendly herd-consciousness.) The burning sun indicated that I need not die in such smallness. There is so much more aliveness burning in the stream. It burns now and beyond, in me and through me. I was made to understand that.
I will never forget the moment. Even if it takes the rest of my life to unpack it's meaning, I will continue to return to it. I had been blessed to drink from a stream by the wayside, and there, suddenly, continually, to lift up my head.
Ray Geers
February 3, 2025
Link to Burnin’ Sun Song:
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