Nighttime Prairie Fire - Song Page
© words & music by Annie Wilson
from the album Out on the Tallgrass Prairie

Album Note:

The flames of a night burn create wild sights and sounds, leaving behind a blackened landscape, and soon ushering in the resurrection of new green regrowth.

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LYRICS

The midnight panorama holds a dozen lines of fire,              

Layered up the hillsides slowly marching higher.

Orange sparks leap and flash in wondrous magic swirls.

The fire light and shadows form a strange and eerie world

In the night-time prairie fire.

 

In taller grass the fire sends up flaming forks of light.       

They separate and rise up like phantoms in the night.

Then a mighty gust of wind blows in and turns the blaze away.

It pours out to the side in a sheet of liquid flame

In the night-time prairie fire.

 

A force of purest energy - beautiful and wild.

The prairie has to have it - in order to survive.

 

We hear the hiss and crackle as the fire travels by

Eating up the brittle winter grass so tinder dry.

Lines of fire meet and form a twister in the night.

Smoke billows into crazy shapes of ghosts up in the sky

In the night-time prairie fire.

 

The prairie night turns dark again; the flames have moved on past 

Exposing rocks and soil beneath the prairie grass.

Glowing cow chips smolder behind the fire’s path.   

The skeletons of blackened grass crumble into ash

In the night-time prairie fire.

 

The fire is finally over laying bare the earth.

The way is cleared for regrowth - the annual rebirth.

 

Just a few days later comes the miracle of spring,

As tiny shoots of grass turn the hills from black to green. 

This prairie resurrection has now become complete

The dead is gone, new life begins, and so it will repeat

In this land of prairie fire.