Luckily, there's been space between the bands of storms, so our streets aren't flooded; we'll be able to make it to church. There was even a moment of eerie, beautiful light. I couldn't resist the opportunity to take a different kind of sunrise picture:
With the flash on, the pictures take on an apocalyptic quality:
Yesterday I wrote about going through old files and finding poems that I thought might be lost forever. Let me post one here. I think I wrote it in 1998, when we had a hurricane pass nearby. My spouse and I went to Hollywood Beach, and I was impressed by the power of the ocean and the wind, even with the storm passing through the space between the Florida Keys and Cuba, some 5 hours to our south.
I wrote the following poem, which I still like. I look at my current poems and see how much I've grown as a poet. But I'm glad that poems like these still make me happy.
I think there's a Pentecost/Holy Spirit quality to this poem too, although I wouldn't have articulated it quite this way at the time I wrote it. In the intervening years, I've become much more aware of the wind imagery in the Bible, in the idea of God breathing and creating things, in the idea of "ruack," that wonderful, Old Testament word for wind and used to describe God's creative process in the creation stories of Genesis.
Clean Sweep
While other folks board
up their windows,
she opens hers wide
to the hurricane winds.
She goes to the beach.
Unlike the surfers,
she has no interest in waves
that crash against the shore.
The sand abrades her skin.
The wind sweeps into every crevice.
Behind her, transformers pop and crackle.
Energy explodes.
Even though the palms bow
to the storm, she lifts
her arms above her head,
struggles to remain standing.
That night, she sleeps
soundly. Even though the wind
howls and hoots and hammers at the walls,
she breathes clean air and dreams fresh visions.
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