Milton

You May Ask Who Are the Storm Gods

Milton passed
Helene passed over
Earlier
Now one
At least
Is turn out
To sea
Where it will accost
As storms do
Ships and islands
There

In their way
We’re only in their way
The hurricane
Tornadoes
Storms are mindless

Believing gods are in there
Might
Be Interesting

We may say
God of the storms
To be figurative
To add to
The personality of God
For our
Relating
Also to make sense in fear and
Hope
That God is intimate with
Nature
And God is

And when God might say
People of the Earth
What are you doing with the planet
Well
I guess we could argue for metaphors
Of us with God
Though
I don’t think
God will go
With that

For the Earth is ours
The human ours
Even
God-given
And the responsibility is ours
Even
Now in aspect
Of storms

We make them worse

And who’s to care
While
We are rescuing
And
Picking up
And mourning
Oh
So much
So much that is
Lost

Afterward
When afterward
Becomes
The now
We can talk on this
And then together
May do
Something for

This Earth
The extraordinary gift
On which
You know
You know
We live

C L Couch

Photo by Don Daskalo on Unsplash


Paradise Unfounded

Helene was bad
What’s coming’s worse
Historic
I keep hearing
As in
Worthy of a history
And maybe someday
Someone will write about
The storms
We’ve had
And how we made them
Worse
Because of climate change
Which at last
Maybe we’ll say
Is real
As the ice shelfs melt
And habitation on the coast
Will have to move
Inland
Farther than
We had been thinking
If thinking
At all

Everything we’re using up
We’ll need
More of
And more of

Milton will take
More lives
Away
And things that were alive
Like animals and crops
Fauna and
Flora
Generally
Plus the living spirit
Of the cities
And the towns
Farms
So many places
That had energy
And
Semblances of unity
Now gone

Someone named a hurricane
Whose most famous
Name’s
Sake
Wrote most well-known
Not about regained
But how we
Lost
Anything like
Paradise

C L Couch


“Milton appears headed for Tampa, where the National Hurricane Center is warning of up to 15 feet of storm surge.”
NBC/MSN
a little more than half an hour ago

Photo by Demure Storyteller on Unsplash 
Beautiful sunset at Clearwater Beach in Tampa, Florida.
[photographer’s caption]