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| NOT my house |
Usually in news reports when folks are "devastated" it's hyperbole, as in "When Man U beat us in the 90th minute we were devastated," but this is different. Friends, the devastation in Houston and surroundings is unspeakable. I can't even imagine it, although my anguish at losing a box of keepsakes to a tiny basement leak is still with me. And because I can't imagine the vastness, I'm applying that feeling in another arena.
What follows is metaphor, and not intended at all to make light of the real tragedy of #Harvey.
flooding
“We
have a Houston problem,”
said my
young daughter long ago,
but
this poem is about a hurricane
with a boy's name.
It’s
been brewing off the coast,
and now
we have days
when it
just keeps raining and raining--
no more
tearing winds--
just
the storm stalled and the water
pouring
down and welling up
full of
copperheads and alligators
and it’s
so muddy
you can’t
tell what’s about to bite,
welling
and laking and bayouing
into
the basement
where
we keep our scrapbooks—
sodden,
lost—
into
the first floor
where
we boil our pots
and
feed our beasts—
washed
away—
up to
the second floor
where
we make beds full of
drowned
dreams.
Someone’s
always evacuating.
One of
us takes next to nothing,
knows
it doesn’t matter.
One of
us can barely swim
under
the burdens of everything
she’s
trying to rescue.
One
sets sail on a seesaw.
The
library seems a likely shelter,
but the
books with titles like
“How to
Rise Above It”
have
sunk unreadable into
the beloved
sediment
of hurricane, tropical
storm,
topical
depression.
Houston,
we have a problem,
and
duct tape will not be enough.
draft (c) HM 2017
