The New Storms
a month after the swearing in
Wind pushes over the final redwood.
Now it’s raining violins & cellos, melancholy wood of the sky.
A well-tuned Steinway smashes down on the driveway.
Followed by the piano tuner.
Followed by grocery carts of the homeless.
Gavels clatter down. Blizzard of star-pointed pinatas.
Pharmacists, their white coats flapping.
Down from the hatches of cargo planes fall the rappers,
hand-held mics clonking off the rooftop.
The ash
of immolated verbs blocks the sun.
Children smell their picture books starting to smolder.
A python drops from a backyard tree, hauls itself your way,
the shape of the cracked bell in its stomach
dissolving.
Lock the doors. Unplug Siri & Alexa. Break out steel umbrellas.
True, weather stations have been robbed of their radar.
But why didn’t we see this coming?
John Calderazzo’s work has appeared in Audubon, Brevity, Cleaver, Georgia Review, Orion, Pinch, Best American Nature Writing, and Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon). In the Soup: Poems is forthcoming later this year from Middle Creek Publishing. Retired from teaching nonfiction in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Colorado State University, he frequently teaches storytelling skills to scientists.
Read John Calderazzo’s poem “Big Day,” a finalist in the Terrain.org 14th Annual Poetry Contest. And read more Letters to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance and Democracy, published by Trinity University Press in collaboration with Terrain.org.
Header photo by Trevor M, courtesy Pixabay.
