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Storm


ISSUE:  Summer 2017

 

The summer after, a storm
split the sky over Hergla and I wanted to be in it.
I climbed the rickety ladder to the roof where the night was
purple and vast and you could see
the whole bruise of the ocean. I was still
in pain, I thought I would always be in pain,
but it had receded like a tide and so
was bearable, almost welcome,
made me feel more acutely
alive. The clouds swelled violet,
violent. The gales battered me with sand.
For a moment, this seemed all
there was—as far as I could see the world
desert and ocean and heaven
shattering along its bright scars—
and I thought the creeping thought
of someone who has just made it through
her worst imaginable thing, that I must begin
imagining again for surely
a worse calamity awaits
to take its place, wondered if
I would spend the rest of my God-given-
back life bracing for the next
inescapable disaster, the Earth or my body
cleaved right under me, the sky
falling in black drops like stones,
and though I felt this real fear the storm didn’t subside
as it might in a movie of my life, suddenly
waning to prove a point—no, it kept on
in its wild terror, me there stunned
at the center, fixed as the ocean broke and broke
against the shore’s skin, as the desert
raged on, barren and hissing.

 

 

1 Comments

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Crisp Earnheart's picture
Crisp Earnheart · 6 years ago

This is a great poem...but I don't like calling it a poem. I think poems are really just words that we chew on and swallow and then throw them up on a sheet of paper or a computer document even when so much time is spent on making it. Truly, poems like these can have such an in-depth meaning (probably because they came from the depths). I really enjoyed this throw-up. :)

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