Tsunami Riptide [Today's News Poem, March 13, 2011]

Tsunami Riptide [Today's News Poem, March 13, 2011]

Unravel the surface and peel off the ceilings.
Reveal, repeal, uncover, then exile.
Start up the truck as the water's delivery
Peels the lampposts, borrows the vehicles.

We play while we live with our toys and our tools,
The buildings worth a life of unceasing work.
Nothing in history rhymes with disaster—
Past it, patterns form—they're etched beneath our feet.

"Japanese officials struggled on Sunday to contain a quickly escalating nuclear crisis in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and tsunami, saying they presumed that partial meltdowns had occurred at two crippled reactors, and that they were bracing for a second explosion, even as problems were reported at two more nuclear plants."
—HIROKO TABUCHI and MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, Published: March 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14nuclear.html



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Poseidon Love-Detector [Today's News Poem, September 4, 2010]

Poseidon Love-Detector [Today's News Poem, September 4, 2010]

The mooring has loosened. The vessel is drifting away,
Lost to the climate: a vortex that tests what we'll do
When rigging unknots and Poseidon enlists all the gods.
Tossed by the ocean and blinded by raindrops I watch
Your boat as it welcomes the grip of the swells, so I leap
Into the water and tackle indifferent lines
And gather the tether that kept us together 'till now.
Din all around; castanets in the clouds—I can't hear
Your words though I know what you're shouting: the opposite thing
That you mean. You are screaming, 'just stay on the shore,'
But my brother I'll drown in a riptide and feed
All the crabs with my eyes—the survivors of hunts
With my net on their pier. They have grown in that time
From the undersized runts to the masters of tide.
You are lost and I've lost you already—we're finished.

“Hurricane Earl made landfall in Canada on Saturday and fizzled after a series of scares along the U.S. East Coast, flooding roads, felling trees and cutting power to tens of thousands in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia. One man died in the Halifax region after he swam into rough waters to secure a boat that had come loose from its mooring. He drowned while attempting to swim back to shore.”
– REUTERS, 6:19 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/09/04/news/news-us-weather-storm-earl.html



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From Gas to Sauce [News Poem, May 18, 2010]

From Gas to Sauce [News Poem, May 18, 2010]

You mean I could have packed
Myself inside a trunk,
And floated past the bridge?
A riptide could have pulled
Me past baleen and shells,
Along the sandy coast?
A crab to pinch my ass,
The clams to laugh at me?

And long before I'd get
Too far, I'd snag upon
The brownish-greenish kelp.
Too far from rescuers,
I'd sink below the leaves
And watch the tide possess
The bladders filled with air:
A message for my home.

“The unidentified woman was white or a light-skinned Latina and appeared to be in her 30s, police said. Her body was in the fetal position inside the case, which was found near Folsom Street and the Embarcadero about 8:45 a.m... A young child walking on the Embarcadero noticed the suitcase and alerted a relative, who called authorities...”
– Jaxon Van Derbeken, San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/18/BAMG1DGLO6.DTL


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