Monday, February 17, 2020

Poem

Elemental


Dust and leaves swirled around my feet
In the middle of a summer cyclone.
My body was buffeted but I hardly swayed
For even the wind ignores the likes of me.


I went for a morning swim in the big surf
Off an abandoned beach,
After everyone else had joined the evacuation,
But the roiling ocean refused to get me wet.


When the house was burning down
I doused myself in gasoline
But couldn’t feel the heat
While dazed gray ash fluttered against my face.


In the middle of the earthquake
I was the only thing that didn’t shake
While the walls all collapsed
And the sidewalks cracked.


For I was the fault


And the eye of the hurricane


The tenth of a degree before the flash point


I have been the empty void
That flees just as it gets filled,
The vacuum of space that exists
Only when there’s nothing there.


I am the low dark clouds that promise to make mud
Of your finely raked pile of dirt.


Just you wait!


I’m coming for you, to devastate
This bonhomie of false tranquility.


You were the cataclysm that unmoored my ship.
Our thundering hearts remain as aftershocks

2/16/20

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