The Alchemist’s Lantern: Holding Fire in the Heat
🗓️ June 27, 2025
✍️ by Herbert Hagell
The summer heat has settled in.
The kind that buzzes behind window screens,
that makes the roads shimmer,
that presses a sleepy haze into the afternoon.
We’re in the thick of summer’s first true heatwave—
air conditioners humming,
cold drinks clinking,
bodies moving slower.
And yet, amid the stillness, something stirs.
A kind of pressure.
A quiet alchemy.
It’s this season that reminds me most of the fire we carry inside.
Not the explosive kind. The enduring one—the one you can count on.
The one that asks for presence, not performance.
The one that whispers: transform.
✨ The Quiet Fire Within
Not all transformation begins with conflagration.
Sometimes, it begins with a slow kindling—
a moment, a line,
a breath held just long enough to shift something inside.
We don’t always see it.
But we feel it in:
- words that return after silence
- thoughts that glow at the edge of sleep
- rituals we keep, even when we’re not sure why
In Poet’s Ritual, I wrote:
“Only that pen
can summon the truth,
the essence,
of my verse,
the bloodletting.”
— from “Only Red,” Poet’s Ritual
That’s what the fire within feels like to me.
Not drama, not destruction—just the smallest flame that never goes out.
Held in the quietest part of ourselves.
🕯️ The Alchemist’s Lantern
I sometimes imagine that I write by the light of a very old lantern.
Not one that floods the room.
Not one that burns down buildings.
But something gentler. Stranger. Wiser.
A halo over sacred texts.
The Alchemist’s Lantern.
It doesn’t light the path forward. It lights the inside—
where our fears and questions and unspoken truths wait to be stirred.
It’s a personal relic.
Something ancient and intimate.
A flame passed down from writer to writer, poem to poem.
A guiding metaphor for the fire we tend in our craft,
even in heat, even in doubt, even in waiting.
Bringing us from—bringing us to.
🔥 Poem: The Alchemist’s Lantern
It’s an odd feeling when I look at poems in new light.
I find new meaning, or enlightenment.
In the upcoming chapbook, The Alchemist’s Lantern: A Walk Through Ink and Shadow,
I realized I had been talking about transformation all along.
Each poem is a flicker in the dark—
kindled by memory, ritual, and resilience.
Together, they illuminate the quiet forge of becoming.
“Ideas, like morning dew,
in my mind dripped and wet.”
— from “Beginning,” The Alchemist’s Lantern
“She left with her empty suitcase.
Her gentle sigh lives ever-after.”
— from “Transformation Knocked,” The Alchemist’s Lantern
“A lantern shimmers in the mist?
It draws me, as fate insists.”
— from “Lantern in the Mist,” The Alchemist’s Lantern
“The pen—my wand, my axe, my plow,
carved paths in fields where words allow.”
— from “Finished?”, The Alchemist’s Lantern
“Some griefs, time can never heal.
When the misty lantern returns,
I know for whose soul it will yearn.”
— from “Search for the Lantern in the Mist,” The Alchemist’s Lantern
Together, these glimpses whisper what the lantern teaches:
To keep walking.
To keep writing.
To hold the ember even when the wick grows cold.
Thus, the title of the collection transformed.
❤️ The Passion We Carry
Not all fire is for transformation.
Some is for devotion.
Some for memory.
Some for touch.
The same flame that guides our words
also fuels the way we love—messy, holy, and enduring.
Love, too, is an alchemist.
In The Passion, love is not just spark or ache—
it’s the steady warmth we return to, even in silence.
“She lit the candle with both hands—
as if the flame might understand longing.”
— from “Rekindle,” The Passion
“Your voice, even in memory,
stirs the coals beneath my ribs.”
— from “Whisper Flame,” The Passion
“Our bodies once danced like shadow and spark,
but it was your stillness that undressed my fear.”
— from “After the Heat,” The Passion
“I do not need the fire to burn again—
only to know that once, it did.”
— from “Relic,” The Passion
“We stitched the night together
with sighs and silence.”
— from “Ember Thread,” The Passion
Let this be a reminder:
The quiet fire within is also a flame of connection.
And sometimes, the greatest transformations
begin with a touch,
a memory,
or a love that refuses to fade.
🎉 Coming July 11: The Alchemist’s Lantern (Chapbook Release)
The Alchemist’s Lantern: A Walk Through Ink and Shadow
is a lyrical collection born from a one-month challenge—
guiding readers through grief, reflection, and renewal,
lit by the ember of creative fire.
If this blog post speaks to something you’ve carried through heat or silence,
this collection may be for you.
Watch for it on July 11 as part of The Quiet Verse poetry releases.
🗓️ Looking Ahead: Issue #12 – The Fire Within
Our next issue of The Quiet Verse arrives on July 4, carrying the theme:
The Fire Within / Inner Transformation.
It’s no accident that it lands just after Canada Day and just before Independence Day (USA)—
a liminal space between celebrations.
This moment invites introspection:
Who are we becoming in the heat?
What do we burn away—and what are we refining?
“I did not set out to conquer the fear.
I sat beside it.”
— from “Fear,” Wisdom of the Quiet Muse
That’s what the Alchemist’s Lantern helps us do—
sit beside fear, shadow, potential, and possibility.
And write anyway.
💬 What Fire Are You Holding?
It’s not all instant—
the fire that doesn’t roar, but radiates,
the lantern you carry through heat and hesitation,
the transformation that simmers while the world waits,
the kind of passion that doesn’t burn you up—but leaves you sated.
Do you have a summer ritual,
a creative superstition,
a fire you’re holding quietly?
I’d love to hear about it—feel free to share in the comments,
or just whisper it to the wind.
(You never know who’s listening.)
