Tomorrow the Hurricane

Tomorrow the Hurricane

(“We have been speaking in Christ and before God. You are our dear friends, and everything we do is to make you stronger.” 2 Corinthians 12:19b)

Tomorrow the hurricane may come,
the centrifuge within, hidden from view.
Uprooting trees, disintegrating leaves, and
smothering thought with its humidity.

But we keep the tempests contained, don’t we?
We wrap our skin around the pressure that threatens
to suck us in, and then,
to implode everything we haven’t nailed down.

Till then, of course, our skin looks the same; our eyes,
our hands, our knees, our feet. If we curled one wrinkle
on our anxious foreheads the whole building might explode.

And, gauging from the last time our home was in ruins,
we are unsure how the rebuilding would go. Will people walk by,
wondering why
they escaped the storm that destroyed the corner lot?
Will couples stand just outside the caution tape, filling out forms,
promising help, and going home to air-conditioning and amnesia?
Who can blame them when the catastrophe is blamed on the skin
that refused to hold it in.

So now you know, if you read closely, that mostly we would love
to let the air pressure equalize,
reveal empty earth already denuded by unrealized dreams
and hurricanes trapped within.

And a few have known the scale of the storm, and a few have not
railed that I should have known better. And a few have nailed back
a couple of boards when they could. And a few have mailed love.

And a few, with their own shaking hands, have planted roses in
the dark, bare earth.