In Chile’s Ñuble and Bío-Bío, nineteen January twenty-six,
Eighteen dead, twenty thousand fled their districts.
Twenty-four fires running, eight-and-a-half thousand hectares wide,
Wind above thirty-eight degrees throwing embers far aside.

Across Victoria weeks later heat would not decline,
Six major fires reported, three beyond the line,
Eleven thousand hectares burned where Otway forests stand,
An area near Paris measured on the land.

In Patagonia lightning struck and travelled twenty kilometres in a day,
Drought since two-thousand-eight had drawn the moisture away,
Wind aligned with valley slope and fuels lay close and dry,
So the head fire ran forward while the spotting filled the sky.

Greece burned under heat again in twenty-twenty-five,
Pine litter, grass and shrubs where dry fuels thrive,
Villages evacuated while aircraft crossed the blue,
When drought and wind converge new fires ignite anew.

Bolivia’s eastern lowlands saw a scar immense and stark,
Ten million hectares burned across the Amazonian arc,
A hundred thousand square kilometres blackened in the year,
Almost Iceland in extent along a drought-struck frontier.

In Peru the monitors counted more than ten thousand fires,
Across coastal scrub and forest where the dry season conspires,
Each ignition small perhaps but together altering ground,
Shifting forests, soil and rivers where the burn returns around.

In the Pantanal wetlands where floodwaters once stood,
Three thousand four hundred square kilometres burned through grass and wood,
When drought lowers water tables peat and grasses interlace,
And the wetland turns to tinder across a continental space.

Valparaíso burned in twenty-twenty-four, the losses stark,
At least one hundred thirty-one lives lost in the dark,
When embers leap ahead and structures ignite in chain,
The city burns from house to house until little can remain.

In Jasper lightning started what crews fought through weeks of strain,
Thirty-two thousand hectares marked the scar across the plain,
A territory larger than Malta mapped in ash and pine,
Three thousand firefighters held two hundred seventy-eight kilometres of line.

Humboldt traced the Earth in bands of temperature and rain,
Where climate shapes the forests and the forests shape the plain,
He warned that when the land is cleared the balance may expire,
And heat and drought return the lesson written now in fire.

From Canada to Chile similar patterns now transpire,
Dry fuels, rising heat preparing landscapes for the pyre,
Atmospheric conditions aligning to conspire,
And forests answering disturbed climates in columns of fire.



Poem performed by Rachel Fowler. Video by Ollie Voak.