Weird Weather

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.