Well, we had a tornado here in Duanesburg on Thursday. It was an F3 and it pulverized one house, damaged some more and took out a bunch of trees about 5 miles from where I live. And that started me thinking about the unpredictability of life…. And how fragile our anchors to the planet under some conditions….
I have to admit that I have always had a creepy fascination with some kinds of “natural disasters” — tornadoes and tsunamis being at the top of my list. They appear in my dreams from time to time and I am always riveted by news reports and film footage of both. And yet, if I were to actually witness either one, I’d probably have “the big one” and that would be that.
My thoughts on this are scattered, like the debris I saw yesterday across from the now-vanished house on Rte. 20. I don’t know what to make of it, except that these types of events only increase my respect for mother nature. I think that the disasters created by human activity earth are ultimately going to do much more damage to us that any of these. And I believe that whirlwinds and big waters are huge and urgent clues that we need to PAY ATTENTION and stop trashing our beloved planet.
Here’s a poem I wrote in Marj Hahne’s class at IWWG Skidmore in 2003.
The Harpist Survives A Tornado
~ inspired by this line from Liesel Mueller: “The harpist
believes there is music in the skeletons of fish.
The day the tornado came a
harpist was carried across
the river. She now believes
in God. There was a rain-
bow after. Is the sky
trustworthy? Music
came from wind
in trees, rattling
skeletons, silent
stars,dancing
scales of
fish.