One Year Later

This is a poem I wrote after seeing a picture Nolan took when he went to Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina last year. Here's the picture:

Something about this image stuck in my head, and, a few days later, a poem came out of it. It's been tweaked a bit since I first published it (on my other blog), but the essence remains the same. I don't know about a title...it doesn't have one right now. Anyway, here's the poem (some of the alignment doesn't format well in Blogger, but it doesn't disrupt the poem too much):


While press conferences and politicians play at placing blame,
taking steps to stabilize, mobilize, organize, emphasize, criticize,
devastation’s stench hangs thick in the brightening air
and she silently sits upon the splinters of somewhere she once knew.

To say it’s gone and to see it’s gone are different than
stepping into the arms of Gone.

An anthology of works, of words, she sat reading in the blue armchair once,
now not blue, but black with the aftermath of mud and chaos; But oh,
the anthology gone, too. All of her books. Everyone’s books

and cats and dogs and and refrigerators and rats and parents and plants and jazz and gin and calendars and cell phones and lovers and lemonade and magazines and mercedes and everyday and

Everything.

And the space between the living and the dead
is the space of a carefully blinking eye,
And the nothing that descends like madness
is now the nothing that belongs to

Everyone.

Seeing that which she cannot unsee
Knowing that which she cannot unknow
faster than the colors of dreams the world can vanish before you
only to reappear a wholly unrecognizable place,
where blue steps lead to nothing,
or they only lead to everything and

Everywhere.

Now, only the steps remain.

And steps they remain, for those who will go
and listen for the beating of hope’s great green wings.