This layered poem meditates on the act of lighting a candle, both ordinary and profound. It moves from the pragmatic (hydrocarbons, by-products of the ocean bed) to the personal and ancestral, where flame becomes memory, devotion, and continuity. The candle is at once science and symbol: a way to measure time, to honor the dead, to kindle warmth against winter's dark. Oonah Joslin captures how ritual survives in the smallest of gestures, glowing with both practicality and longing.