Classic and Contemporary Poetry
A REPLY TO STORMS IN NEW ORLEANS; FOR MY MOTHER IN SEATTLE, by CAROLYNE WRIGHT First Line: Nothing unholy about lightning where Subject(s): New Orleans; Storms | ||||||||
Nothing unholy about lightning where I come from. No nightly pyrotechnics, no Voudoun-Thor hurling his thunderbolts upside the sky, great swags of rain-laurel slapping the jalousies. Never the dull pressing-down of cloud-cover, breezeways in heat-stunned swelter, saltwater glaze on the skin. Not the river twelve feet above the city, the levee that cradles the current in its arms rolling slow as thunder. No monsoon's straight-down drench, Creole sweetness and crepuscule making an evening of afternoon. Where I grew up, I never had to shun standing under slash pines, never run through the shotgun row of rooms unplugging lamps and window fans. I never had to lie down with a man as far as bodies can from door frames and let the tempest steal words from our mouths. No silence before the storm or drips from eaves like afterthoughts. Where I'm from, storms poured out their cumulus contents and moved on, silver as parachute-silk linings. For them, no barometric records Made to be broken, no sopped sponges in the corners, no oleander shrubs huddled on the neutral ground along Elysian Fields, beaten flat by baseball hail. I never skidded into wrong turns down one-way canals of street-flood, or flipped over in some impassable cul-de-sac between Piety and Desire, wheels spinning against grillework. Only once, the postwar powerlines fallen, My father across the Cascade rain front in Spokane, thunder over Alki Point gunning its engines on the roof, my mother stuck candles in a loaf of bread, the kitchen beyond the tapers dim as a Rembrandt interior. My mother younger than she'd ever be again. It's the birthday party of the rain, she said, to quiet my baby brother's whimper. Copyright © Carolyne Wright. First appeared in The New England Review, Volume 21, Number 4, Fall 2000. http://www,middlebury.edu/~nereview | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...STORM AT HOPTIME by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN THERE IS A SOLEMN WIND TONIGHT by KATHERINE MANSFIELD DEWEY AND DANCER by JOSEPHINE MILES MICHAEL IS AFRAID OF THE STORM by GWENDOLYN BROOKS BREACHING THE ROCK by MADELINE DEFREES THE CLOUDS ABOVE THE OCEAN by STEPHEN DOBYNS OF POLITICS, & ART by NORMAN DUBIE TREMENDOUS WIND AND RAIN by ANSELM HOLLO |
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