Saturday's Poem: The Storm

Hurricane Donna

Hurricane Donna

As New York and the rest of the Eastern seaboard await a pounding from Hurricane Irene, I have been remembering Brooklyn's encounter with Hurricane Donna in 1960.

My perspective is that of a child...a vague sense of excitement tinged with fear. It was a school day, and at P.S. 179, parents were coming to retrieve their children so they would be home and presumably safe with their families when havoc struck. I waited nervously, but soon I was one of just a couple of kids left in my class, and we were brought to the auditorium to sit with the others who were as yet unclaimed, among them my two older brothers, and maybe my sister Marlene was there too.

All I remember with clarity is my father's welcome appearance, still wearing his on-the-job overalls, his kind eyes weary as he scanned the room for us. It was already raining hard as we drove back to our railroad apartment on Coney Island Avenue, and somehow the day and night passed, windows lashed by wind and rain, lights flickering, but all of us together.

Our neighborhood was not flooded like the one above, but the next day was its own adventure of debris and fallen trees, new streams in every gutter, and all the post-storm drippings and discoveries. It was September, back-to-school season, and maybe in my 9-year-old mind the significance of Hurricane Donna was the sense of holiday it had brought.

Anyway, it was very long ago.

But Irene looks like a fierce one. I am imagining there is a strange feeling in the city now, with transit shut down, and folks hunkered down anxiously waiting for the worst of it to pass. I wish them all safe haven and the luckiest of outcomes.

And here's a stormy poem for today, The Storm by Theodore Roethke:

1

Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
the lamp pole.

Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.

2

Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The waves not yet high, but even,
Coming closer and closer upon each other;
A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,
The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,
Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.

A time to go home!--
And a child's dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,
A cat runs from the wind as we do,
Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,
Where the heavy door unlocks,
And our breath comes more easy--
Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.

3

We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.
We wait; we listen.
The storm lulls off, then redoubles,
Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,
Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,
Flattening the limber carnations.

A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,
Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.
Water roars into the cistern.

We lie closer on the gritty pillow,
Breathing heavily, hoping--
For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,
The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,
The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,
And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.