POEM: Smashed
Faced today with a growing hurricane season, it seemed appropriate that I start off my blog with a poem about the mother of all hurricanes, the 1900 storm that wiped out Galveston. This is especially so, as I have just been thru a few myself, and a good part of the southeast is dealing with a double dose of overlapping hurricanes visiting within weeks of each other: Helene and Milton.
When I first came to Texas, I had the dubious honor of riding out Alicia, which passed its eye right over my home, like the welcome wagon from hell. It was a get acquitted card for the 1900 Storm which had become, for me, new local history. It came before the naming of storms, and had it been named, it would have been instantly retired. The 1900 storm was the worst disaster in US history, to this day. It began a life long entanglement with storms, both live and in poetry. I gave the storm the name Misery, and titled this project, Misery’s Lick.
The pieces in this project tend to be longer than my average, as there was just so much to absorb. It was a storm so terrible it was not spoken of afterwards. It altered the course of history, destroying Galveston as the Newport of the West, a playground for millionaires, and gave the crown to Houston. The entire island was covered by storm surge so deep, it smashed buildings, wharves and railroad bridges, using the debris to batter the rest. ‘Smashed’ is one of many poems from Misery’s Lick, most of which are very dark, being true to the nature of Misery.
Having just stood toe to toe with Alberto and Beryl, not to mention the recent drecho, this seems like a foreboding, but poignant first offering. Hope you enjoy.
Smashed
Everything we could possibly make
Was unmade.
Stairs and straight lines
were destroyed.
All things hospitable to man
were rubbed into splinters,
jarred into angles we can’t
live with.
Chaos was heaped into a useless order
and tossed over the living and dead alike.
The stone walls of churches fell
as though bombed by a distant hatred.
In the days before we mastered
a bird’s eye view, the city was raked
into a jungle of rubble, a language
of what was now indecipherable
even to the babbling, to the
converted.
The winds had done as much damage
as the waters.
Hundred mile an hour gusts
took the measuring equipment off the roof
before the winds peaked.
It lifted house-tops and slung them aside
into random targets of what was
still standing.
Home pillars and lamp posts
joined the wharf boards and
pier pilings sluicing through the streets.
The dead and doomed were rammed
and bludgeoned by the torn-away weapons
of the rains and winds.
The city ground away beneath the flood line
in a lurching, battering slurry.
Nothing waded away.
No one swam ashore.
No one would walk on water
that a desperate limb wouldn’t
pull him under.
Beneath the raging crests
sunken cemeteries
undersea silent gardens
where crosses made
and unmade themselves.
~~~~~