The hurricane came.
Greater than her sisters
Who swept through before
More magnificent, more original,
A new storm
Animam Agere
A cosmic whirlpool
Seen from space.
Lenticular clouds
On a cell phone
Shared over coffee
On sixty sixth street
And Amsterdam
With eggs,
Bagels,
Onion & tomato,
Our favourite diner,
Cited for vermin.
But still we go
The papers
Over a breakfast, late,
Show:
A UFO
A scout
A wheel
A herald,
Over the ocean,
A new Jericho.
A sky mirror
A water spout
A white roundel
A corryvreckan
For the ages...
"Evacuate
Get out!"
"Trumpets of angels,
Like an atom bomb!
Blowing up
The Eastern seaboard!"
The headlines shout.
The hurricane came
She began
With the wind turbines
Off Rhode Island
Crosses for dead giants
Spinning their blades
With an accelerated perfection
Before pitching them
Gravewards
Into the sea.
The grid oscillatory,
A stab of polygraphic energy,
Like a lie discovered,
A climate changed.
Already.
The hurricane came,
Myrtle was her name,
Quaint, old fashioned
Like she’d danced in,
Ja Da
From
The Jazz Age.
So she disguised
Her murderous purpose
Her mission
To castrophise
The city
Where other storms had failed
Visiting the sins of the present,
On the present.
The hurricane came.
And so she wailed,
Bansheed up the coast
Bending palm trees
In to queues
Of praying pilgrim maids
The hurricane came.
All the way to
Rockaway Beach
And wrenched the famous donut sign
From the famous bakery
Tossed on giant waves;
A lonely life ring
With no lives left to save.
The hurricane came.
In the city
She shook the buildings
A thousand fires broke out
Fires on flood
Cable hydras spat
Electricity
Subways sunken,
Darkened,
In to caves.
Watery graves
Cenotes
Footnotes
For the holocene age
The hurricane came.
And took
Those souls left
Borrowed from a future
Of wild fires
Storms
And scorched earth
Brown plateaus
Rising tides
White skies
Too bright
To see
Our children's misery.
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