The Storm
An hour before it arrived, the storm that blew in last night hadn’t even been in the forecast, but as we were getting into bed warning signals screeched from our phones: 90 mph winds…life threatening…take shelter…
Just in case, we snuck into our four-year-old’s room while he slept to clear the closet—the only space in the house with no exterior walls. The news station lost power but kept, somehow, broadcasting audio—flash flooding, conditions ripe for tornadoes—until their generators came on. If we lose the connection, we’ll wake the kids, we said, and wait it out in the closet.
Then the storm split, or seemed to, above our neighborhood so that the worst of the winds hit twenty blocks south and just ten blocks north. Some folks lost their roofs. We didn’t even lose power. We went to bed, slept easy, having, by no action or decision of our own, made it through, as it always felt inevitable that we would.
Even as our walls
shook, we couldn’t imagine
it touching us here.
What Hope There Is
First and foremost, the sparrow
is a sparrow, the cow a cow,
alive or dead, the child
by the water which is water a child.
At this moment, the child cries.
You groan aloud, or the beating
in your chest tightens. The child
is a child. That sentiment means
“deep feeling” is obsolete. What you
deem superficial you dismiss,
you miss. Still, the child
is a child, the cow either alive or dead.
Who’s doing the abstracting here?
Have I said it too plainly? I do want to
be understood and understanding.
The water is filthy and rising. Far off,
a siren wails and fades. Even farther,
how many drones and planes?
Listen, I get it. I too have wished
for more magic (as if one thing
could mean another), have wished
away the task to be done
and not easily. What hope there is
is godless—as much is
clear and crucial. It begins
with the sparrow, with looking,
more intently than ever before,
not thirteen ways but one,
eight billion times. It begins there.
That’s only the beginning.
