Oakland Firestorm

This is, if not a meditation, a question about the nature of the church; it is a real question I asked myself years after our house burnt down.

Oakland Firestorm

We lost our home while at church.
There was a sudden strange dark in worship’s windows,
And Sunday’s pillar of smoke went up before us.
We lifted our eyes to the hills:

Diablos fanned flames, streamed up gloom
In morning’s light, dimmed midday to dusk.
The fire spread fast, jumping eucalyptus trees,
Killing our neighbors, some saved as through fire.

We stepped from church, sun sombered out,
The smoke tower high, the horizon hazed.
We watched from the shelter of dad’s office rise
The Berkeley hills blaze and glow and cinder.

Weeks later we drove down our old street
Of houses on stilts, the steel girders melted
Into arches. It was all black ash but the red
Brick chimneys and the bowls of Weber grills.

We went to Red Cross shelters, slept with strangers,
Thrifted for what was not on our backs
With a 5K FEMA loan. We moved away to Walnut Creek,
Mom read out the Ride of the Rohirrim in a small apartment.

Adolescent, used to moving, I rolled.
Yes, this was a more remarkable dislocation,
That’s how it felt, a hurried and helpless story,
But par for the course. A blur of childhood.

Only years later, telling my own kids, did I ask 
What happened to our church. Did we avoid? Did they pursue?
I had not learned to expect, did not think to wonder why
In California we were left alone.