Nipmuc's Gentle Fire

Lyrics

You walk this land. Fairhaven Hill.
You call it wild.
Untouched. Primeval.
A word you learned from a book.
But the land was never untouched.
It was loved. It was tended.
Before the English ships, before the first surveyor's line,
this was not a thicket. Not a tangle.
The understory was clear enough for a child to run through.
The oaks stood far apart, their arms open to the sun.
The ground wasn't choked with laurel.
It waited. It breathed.
It knew the season was coming.
It knew the hand that held the flame.
This was a garden.
Tended by the Nipmuc, by the Massachusett.
And their tool was a gentle fire.
A cool fire, running low across the forest floor.
Not a breaking, but a making.
Not wildness, but a home.
The oldest kind of care.
They would light the edges in late autumn,
when the ground was damp and safe.
The flames would whisper through the dry leaves,
clearing the brush, turning last year's life to ash.
Food for the coming spring.
It made room for the strawberries to sweeten.
It called the blueberries up from the earth.
It kept the pathways open for the deer.
It was a promise kept with smoke and warmth.
This was a garden.
Tended by the Nipmuc, by the Massachusett.
And their tool was a gentle fire.
A cool fire, running low across the forest floor.
Not a breaking, but a making.
Not wildness, but a home.
The oldest kind of care.
Now the woods grow thick.
The fire is a memory, a fear.
But the old oaks remember.
Look at the char-marks deep in their bark,
healed over centuries.
They remember the warmth on their skin.
The soil itself remembers.
It holds the carbon of a thousand tended years.
A history written in ash.
You call it wild.
Listen closer.
Past the sound of your own feet on the leaves.
The land still breathes.
It remembers the smoke.
It remembers the gentle fire.