I can’t seem to separate poetry from urgency.
But doesn’t a good poem first float before it lands
taking its time?
Born of long polished stones
requiring harnessing and careful training
like a well raised and ripened fruit.

But my words are bursting
like category four hurricanes
Like volcanoes that pour their laden heat for weeks.

They call out like wildfires
or icebergs falling
thunderously
thousands of feet down
towards their dying
into the churning
blacker-than-black
arctic sea.

I cannot help myself.
(Nor as we know can the iceberg.)

So I am singing out into this medium,
no seasoned polisher of stones,
but an ordinary soul
a lover
a woman
a mother
singing an urgent love song
gripped with passion in times
when time is short.

What if the hurricanes and wildfires
are not “weather events”
but urgent poems?

Ripping away the conventional use of language
leaving us speechless
up-ended
floating.

In the aftermath…
time suspended,
our mouths agape
thoughts held still
in silence
as our eyes survey the wreckage.

With hearts softened in the helplessness
the fruit of the poem can be plucked:
A quiet voice,

stark.

alarming,

real:

“What have we done?”