How it’s done

Meteorological madness, it was,
the warnings accreting like worries,
overlapping, tumbling into
ominous air,  hushed and
heavy as portents:

Severe thunderstorms.
Flash floods.
Tornadoes.

Streetlights cleaved
the midday dark, and when
the mouths of the sky opened, they
shouted awesome as if Nature were
angry at its word being co-opted,
diminished, applied to every
unworthy and trivial good.

Here, said Nature, is awesome:
two inches of rain in fifteen minutes,
gales to capsize galleons,
pea-sized hail forming snowdrifts
in late July.  Rivers foaming
and galloping over ruined banks.

Here, said the wild world, is awesome.

***

I shoveled the deck later,
surveyed the damage:
Young spinach and kale shredded
inside the shattered cold frame.
Ripening cherry tomatoes
pulverized; likewise, the rhubarb,
its broad, wrinkled leaves in tatters.

Yet, new growth this morning, hatching
from the plant’s center like a verdant egg.
The tomatoes, too, sprouting tender leaves,
though there will be no more buds
and no harvest, not before a killing frost.

They were still alive and keeping on, as if
it were all the same: the sun and the storm,
the fruit and the barren stalks,
the benevolence of one day,
the violence of another.

Oh, I said, nearing 60 with so much
gone wrong, so much unrealized:

That’s how it’s done.

 

 

 

 

 

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Tags: aging, Buddhism, equanimity, flood, nature, rain, resilience, spirituality, storm, summer, tornado, weather