Black Friday

These tragic days bring back 30 year old memories. Time for a poem.

The screen door is so thin

No kind of shelter in the face of whatever this is

Skies shrouded with dirt

dark as intermittent radio reports

I am six, almost seven

Out on my grandparent’s acreage if I remember right

Hid from the storm’s piercing eye

My mom is in the hospital for unrelated reasons

(always in the hospital)

She watches through an upstairs window while ambulances unload bloody faced bodies from the trailer park

I don’t remember being as afraid as the adults 

Peeking out from behind brave masks

Shouldering the frail feigned strength of parenthood

Rumours reach our hideout

Stories too wild to be true lodge themselves in my mind,  indisputable

On a highway my aunt is driving a small red truck when 

the funnel picks her up

spins the truck around like Dorothy’s little shack

places her unharmed down the road against the traffic

Pictures come into focus

Maybe I saw these things or maybe, 

I heard them and painted my own images

Trees along the highway uprooted and overturned, 

roots reaching desperately to heaven 

Hail the size of marbles. No golf balls! No baseballs!!

Hail is in the deep freeze for safe keeping

We want to hold those images

Trap them in our loose webbed memory

Maybe we can make something from all of this madness

You cannot make sense of a sky that twists itself around you

Daytime darkness and flooded freeways

Flying farm trucks and the trailer-park poor hit hardest

There is no answer when a house folds in half

When the origami roof is torn and tossed

when the scary basement is your safety

They are saying all of this on the news again

Even today, as the heatwave yields 

to an overnight onset of cold, wind and rain

I hear my father’s voice–

‘looks like Tornado weather’

Everything has happened before

There is something about the sky today

heavy with compassion, maybe

blowing cold through my thin screen door, 

survivor of Black Friday

Across the City of Champions we watch, 

melting frozen hailstones in our hands

Photo from Zurem Meru on Unsplash