Showing posts with label flood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flood. Show all posts

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Roar


Solid beads bounce off my body,
each of their masses colliding with my shell
and I am sore, sensitive from the pelting,
gasping with my gills barely open
a slit.

Upwards I face and solid streams form rolling
down my brow and bridges.
I feel drowning is the same enveloping
as the light or darkness inside
my pores.

Buoyancy is all I have
left to show
I am still
occupying
space.

Stalactites reach for the mineral world
they once had.
Days went and came
passing thru me
like water.

There was nothing new
to sea here,
save
the rumbling and reforming
beneath the surface.



Photograph credited by 'Oregon Sea Lion Cave' Ljmajer [Public domain].

Friday, March 30, 2018

Global warming Returns


There was fire reflected in his eyes,
and though he had been so kind lately,
been treating me tenderly,

it all shattered 
in the calm evening 
after dinner was served and the dishes were done.

There was no wind but things carried. 

He screamed at me 
from the doorway, from deep in his diaphragm,
‘Get Out Now!’

And I thought he was angry at me 
for a flashing moment-I felt
enraged-by the tone.
I noticed, however,
his face was glowing-not from
the evening sunset.

My eyes went south-
east, thirty feet tall, 
a basket of burning serpents
squirmed atop a roof and were licking  the sky,
devouring a tree,
the roof next door is on fire! 

A black plume expands like dye in water,
like a volcano that erupts before projecting 
sound.

In the long hot silence, 
before the sirens in the distance, 
my heart
strains to find a steady rhythm amidst
the pops, cracks and snaps. 

The cats are hiding, children are 
lining the street filming,
hoses are flowing anemic,
I am frozen in place.

I think of how we just survived the flood.

When the fire finally died, 
we waited for the third
and last
good Friday before we may rise and shine
only to be born again
on Sunday. 



Painting by George Hitchcock c. 1904, 'Easter Sunday' in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

The disaster in me


Gasp
gusty winds aloft
Tremble
strings of faulty nerves
Flooded
emotional levee buckles
damned
storm
surges
Quaking knees
collapse
Heat waves
carried by ripping currents
that pull me deeper
nearer
the purple flame
Fire
accelerated
I am a natural disaster.



Image by Leonardo da Vinci, 1517-1518, Natural Disaster [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

And then...

  Change is like that strong smell of cut grass or chopped wood that stops you still. Patterns, a symbol can be an illegible sign,  at first...