Irma

Still at work, I ignored the devastation of Caribbean islandsuntil doom was an overlay on Florida, storm turning northto unzip the state. Sent home to evacuate, I cover windows with tin stacked from last year, go inside to tune the radio to a local station, start watching the TV’s logjam of traffic heading north, airports with faces desperate for flights out closing, honeymooners interviewed as Disney World announces shutdown. In the night my power flickers, finally goes. All day the wind builds, radio warns of storm surge over and over, over and over its dial-up screech of emergency alert. All day bands of wind and rain swing into my house, longer, stronger, rhopalic, band after band, hour after hour, until it’s slammed by ghost locomotives. I get up, walk the house for damage again and again -- twigs, limbs, a Hotchkiss gunfire against tin, knock against the clapboard house as wind unravels the yard’s woods. As night comes on I know my twenty-eight virgin pines are waving their huge arms at the sky under a Tesla ball of lightning strikes. Worn out, thoughts eschatological: “Where are the morning birds tonight?” “If the ocean comes, will my gopher tortoises drown in their burrows?” Sleep finally wins out in the worst of it -- I think, “Maybe I wanted this: let death any second come to me here, but, if not, I will rise tomorrow like a first explorer.” I wake to no apocalypse, ancient pine roots held except for one tree. Heating ravioli on my grandparents’ stone patio grill, the hot tomato smell amazing like the day’s sun and the song of the birds, I see beyond the giant yard clutter one of my pines pushed onto a neighbor’s small oak, over the road, its hundred-foot height now an arch giving greatness to the minor street. Later, threading my bicycle through fallen trees in the quarter-mile avenue to the inlet, past diesel smells of staged crews working to clear roads, I ride up to a first-floor Atlantis of million-dollar homes, the sea pushed over the rocks, trapped inland in a new lake of houses. My neighborhood waits days for the miracle of electricity while I see a new world of poems.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, USA, on a property lush with vegetation. His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Quaci Press Magazine, Dream Noir, and other places.