HURRICANE POEMS FOR A LARK

HURRICANE POEMS FOR A LARK

 

1. Who has seen the Wind?

Always the uninvited guest, the wind
pushes through the porch into the house,
and scatters leaves collected in its wake,
like a shower of crackling seeds freed
from pods that do not come from here.

 

Strange, how it barrels through rooms
disturbing spiders spinning webs busily
before the storm ebbs, safety nets strung
among sepia-tinted pictures on the wall.

 

What did it miss along the way? Winds
as interlopers are blind levelers–the rich
run for supplies as quickly as the poor do.

 

In New York, as in Manila, the howler
brought in the flood, and left laughing.

2. End Times? It is here. Stop It. It is late.

On its tail is another wild wind to mop

Up, where the living would rather be dead
Than build sandcastles on islands gobbled
By the hungry sea that must claim dominion
Over the Ring of Fire, and Mother Earth
Can only yell: Damn it, why puncture the sky,
To heat her armpits, with radioactive leftovers
Of Hiroshima, and the galloping horsemen
Of an unbridled Fukushima paying back
The land of Enola Gay and the hangar of a dark
Dirigible, a Negro Saviour, whose Eastern name
Will not stop the death and dying of civilisation
In Atlantis and now the rigour mortis of Mu?

3. Beware the Deluge Reprised

A Deluge comes. Only this time, we have no Arks

Nor Ararats to salvage all who hope to find
Another Blue Planet in an extended Universe.
No one has applied to be a Noah. They are all,
All retired and tired of saving a ruthless specie,
The homo viator whose journey brings nothing
But a discovery that he has lost the Love he had
For all the meek who shall inherit the Earth.
 

4.  Yolanda Left Uproariously Howling

Her fury might as well have risen from the sea

Wreck every hearth and heart on her wake:
It should not matter, these are worms wriggling
To overstay in rotten mounds of a leftover paradise
Abandoned by leeches of fuel, stones, fire powder,
Who ripped the sides of mountains for nickel
And gold to build the ships that burned villages
From the sky and left like the wind laughing
After the slaughter of the hallooing innocents
Yelping hosannas to a rain of napalm, welcoming
Death and dying as deliriously as they did some
Distant rain brought by growls of sudden thunder.
 

—ALBERT B. CASUGA