These tragic days bring back 30 year old memories. Time for a poem.
The screen door is so thin
No kind of shelter in the face of whatever this is
Skies shrouded with dirt
dark as intermittent radio reports
I am six, almost seven
Out on my grandparent’s acreage if I remember right
Hid from the storm’s piercing eye
My mom is in the hospital for unrelated reasons
(always in the hospital)
She watches through an upstairs window while ambulances unload bloody faced bodies from the trailer park
I don’t remember being as afraid as the adults
Peeking out from behind brave masks
Shouldering the frail feigned strength of parenthood
Rumours reach our hideout
Stories too wild to be true lodge themselves in my mind, indisputable
On a highway my aunt is driving a small red truck when
the funnel picks her up
spins the truck around like Dorothy’s little shack
places her unharmed down the road against the traffic
Pictures come into focus
Maybe I saw these things or maybe,
I heard them and painted my own images
Trees along the highway uprooted and overturned,
roots reaching desperately to heaven
Hail the size of marbles. No golf balls! No baseballs!!
Hail is in the deep freeze for safe keeping
We want to hold those images
Trap them in our loose webbed memory
Maybe we can make something from all of this madness
You cannot make sense of a sky that twists itself around you
Daytime darkness and flooded freeways
Flying farm trucks and the trailer-park poor hit hardest
There is no answer when a house folds in half
When the origami roof is torn and tossed
when the scary basement is your safety
They are saying all of this on the news again
Even today, as the heatwave yields
to an overnight onset of cold, wind and rain
I hear my father’s voice–
‘looks like Tornado weather’
Everything has happened before
There is something about the sky today
heavy with compassion, maybe
blowing cold through my thin screen door,
survivor of Black Friday
Across the City of Champions we watch,
melting frozen hailstones in our hands
Photo from Zurem Meru on Unsplash