Ike

Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, has been battered by storms this summer.




Ike was a ferocious hurricane that left a swath of destruction in his path from the Turks & Caicos Islands across the Caribbean, Haiti, Cuba and the Louisiana and Texas coasts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike
If you are interested in helping in the recovery effort I reccommend the following institutions~

Operation Blessing International~ http://community.ob.org/site/PageServer

Galveston Rising~ http://www.galvestonrising.com/

American Red Cross~ http://www.redcross.org/

after the water

There is a always a threshold for things
that alter us, a clean edge at the start,
the surprise of it like a blade pressed cold
against the throat. The first wave is forgotten

in the next. Fierce water rises like a wicked sun
to spread across the fields, the little houses,
the ponies with their bright new shoes.
Oh, the tumble and spill of cobbled hopes,

the surge of flowerpots and paperbacks!
And there my heart dissolves, in the unbound
Bay, like a snow flake swallowed by the tide,
assimilated so that I might wrap around the fallen

palms and beams, might taste the rust and ruin.
It is nothing, no solace, no redemption,
but a useless rag I use to blot the tortured landscape.
I will not ask for pardon, will not assume

it matters. Better I was a splintered pole,
something stark and astonishing, than this quiet
sadness that only laps the dirty hem of sky,
an imperceptible swell that bears no boat or seed.

August

sea dream , originally uploaded by Sea Dream Studio.

Beneath a coronet
of scrim spun clouds I wait
for nothing. Expectation has flown
away like millet on a parched wind.

My open hands drop only silver
shadows onto the prairie.
I am no emptier than before.
It is only the willingness to stop

the approaching penumbra that alters me.
When possibility is recognized,
met face to face in every surface
that offers clear reflection, I see

that it is but another property
of light, a coveted revision
of the familiar spectrum.
The summer sun sets

the horizon trembling . I aim
to fill my arms with gold and amber
beams, to hoist the impossible
weight of luminance back into the sky.