“The UK is enduring a fourth day as a virtual no-fly zone, as the travel chaos caused by volcanic ash drifting from Iceland shows no sign of ending... Meanwhile, one of the UK's biggest fresh fruit importers said business had ground to a halt because of the disruption.”
– BBC, 04:11 GMT, Sunday, 18 April 2010 05:11
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8627545.stm
“The car went off the opposite side of the road. It slashed through a utility pole, hit the top of Johnson’s 2004 Ford Freestar van parked in the driveway, and smashed into his and Coffey’s home... The accident initially knocked out the electricity for 3,400 people. Some did not have power restored until after this afternoon.”
– Charley Hannagan, The Post-Standard, April 17, 2010, 3:23PM
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/04/car_smashes_into_syracuse_hous.html
“A roughly seven-hour 911 outage in the Eagle area has been blamed on a contractor's error.”
– Associated Press - April 17, 2010 7:55 PM ET
http://www.kcautv.com/Global/story.asp?S=12329805
“A majority of scientists maintain that global warming is a man-made phenomenon. However, they must be prepared to acknowledge that there is another view, for which evidence can also be adduced, even if it seems to conflict with the received wisdom.”
– The Telegraph, 8:01PM BST 14 Apr 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/7591286/Climate-change-always-room-for-doubt.html
A butterfly's volcano's dream of flight
Before the birth projects the ash through night.
By wind the dreamers fly on arctic gusts:
One sips the dew, the other's pollen dusts
The airports, farmlands. Little beasts in herds
Demand the laws apply to their absurd
And delicate activities. A puff
Of superheated carbon's sure enough
To blow them off their path—while butterflies
Don't rage at storms: instead they course-revise.
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4 comments:
I love this one throughout, but especially because of the ending. I'm a fan of the surprise ending in the short horror story and the direct message delivery in the last two lines of a sonnet.
Two nits:
I think the two possessives in a row in the first line make for awkward reading, either aloud or in the mind: "a butterlfly's volcano's dream of flight. Could it be changed to "a butterfly's volcanic, etc etc" ? It's different, true, but I think it still works.
The second nit is less significant, to me:
I don't know why the hyphenated "course-revise" annoys me a bit, but it does. If you changed it to
"their course, revise" it sounds more like a sonnet. However, that just means it sounds more like a 19th century sonnet, which is my own personal bent. You could object to my nit on the grounds that the word "their" is in the next-to-last line, (although that could be changed, I think, to "they" but this little comment box impedes my view of the original.
1) More than one way to read an apostrophe. I play on its usage throughout the poem.
2) I'd rather use weird grammar than comply with some verse-principle. If the end is jarring, it should be. That's what makes it the ending couplet. Awakening from a dream, changing course, volcanic eruptions--I tried to tie it all together.
3) Thanks for reading.
Eyjafjallajökull has become quite a darling of the press and so it should!
A newsworthy satire on those who never tire of demanding ever more even as natural disasters do transpire.
;)
Aww, loveforums... I mean anonymous, you've gotta leave your name for love notes like that:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/forums/?ID=156974642 (note the time stamps)
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