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Writing up a storm: a poetry post


Hello there

This winter has been pretty uneventful on the storm front. I thought that was what the weather was now, storm after storm after storm, but instead it's been pretty much OK, and not even that cold. It's been grey and wet and windyish the last few days, but nothing exciting. No power lines have been torn down, I have not struggled to close car doors, no crazy snow storms, it's even been pretty calm on the wind front, so I've actually been using an umbrella, which is pretty rare around here!

But I'm feeling down in the dumps (lots of rejections, lots of rain, this will pass), and the news just keeps on happening, and who the hell is running the world and why did we let them? Ugh. 

So, my writing prompt today was to write up a storm, and I looked out of my window and wrote what I saw, then thought about it and rewrote it to reflect how I'm feeling and how the world looks through my eyes. And here it is:

What the wind wreaks

Mostly you can't tell.
Looking carefully is not polite
but if you do, if you stare
into that leaden eye
slight shifts of the light
show that things move apace.

It is unfathomable that the rain
never stops. How wide this tide of grey?
How deep? That it should carry on
relentlessly bringing more
and more and more and so
we miss the drowned snowdrops
for the sandbags at the door.

Cackling gulls need make no effort
soaring on still wings across seething skies
and I swear it is the darkest there,
there where the dark-drenched earth
meets cold-wet cloud-crowded sky.

Some speak of blue skies to come
but when the grey sky lightens to white
it only serves to sharpen the shadows
and is that worse? The memory of blue?

We are wrapped and muffled while
waves of wind wash the grey,
fluttering the feathers of the dogged cordyline,
whipping the skinny eucalyptus.
But still they stand
ready for more grey, 
more rain, more wind.
Which will come and will go.

Seasons have passed before
no matter what the wind wreaks.


© Cara L McKee 2/2/17


Prose for Thought

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