…round the clock warnings followed by wet drumming in the flower beds…..  <>Patricia Smith “Ghazal” from Blood Dazzler 

The end of the street here, open like the archetypal breach in a castle wall…  a war of water. Sandy. Then there’s the morning photo of the subway in New York City that made my heart drop [see below]… down there in the shosh and dark water, collapsed dream of cars-on-tracks gliding beneath the city.   It helps to put words to this impossible, terrible wreckage. Here are some poetry lines that speak to catastrophe. Patricia Smith’s National Book Award winner: Blood Dazzler,  about Katrina, has some phrases that resonate with Hurricane Sandy. Here the hurricane speaks:

Weather is nothing until it reaches skin,

Freezes dust, spits its little swords.

Kept to oceans, feeding only on salted water,

I was a rudderless woman in full tantrum,

Throwing my body against worlds I wanted…..   <>Patricia Smith, “Katrina”

 

100 years and more have passed since Bryant wrote these words:

 Lord of the winds! I feel thee nigh,

I know thy breath in the burning sky!…

…in your place

The shadowy tempest that sweeps through space,

A whirling ocean that fills the wall

Of the crystal heaven, and buries all.

And I, cut off from the world, remain

Alone with the terrible hurricane.    <>William Cullen Bryant, “The Hurricane”  

    

Oh Hurricane ravaged East Coast!  You are in my prayers and the prayers of the world. Sending all the people strength!