A Trio of Storm Poems by Emily Dickinson in honor of El Derecho

The Wind Begun to Rock the Grass

The wind begun to rock the grass

With threatening tunes and low, -

He flung a menace at the earth,

A menace at the sky.

The leaves unhooked themselves from trees

And started all abroad;

The dust did scoop itself like hands

And throw away the road.

The wagons quickened on the streets,

The thunder hurried slow;

The lightning showed a yellow beak,

And then a livid claw.

The birds put up the bars to nests,

The cattle fled to barns;

There came one drop of giant rain,

And then, as if the hands

That held the dams had parted hold,

The waters wrecked the sky,

But overlooked my father's house,

Just quartering a tree.

  

The Lightning is a Yellow Fork

The Lightning is a yellow Fork

From Tables in the sky

By inadvertent fingers dropt

The awful Cutlery

Of mansions never quite disclosed

And never quite concealed

The Apparatus of the Dark

To ignorance revealed.

There Came a Wind Like a Bugle

There came a wind like a bugle;

It quivered through the grass,

And a green chill upon the heat

So ominous did pass

We barred the windows and the doors

As from an emerald ghost;

The doom's electric moccasin

That very instant passed.

On a strange mob of panting trees,

And fences fled away,

And rivers where the houses ran

The living looked that day.

The bell within the steeple wild

The flying tidings whirled.

How much can come

And much can go,

And yet abide the world!

Friday night the DC area was hit by a Derecho, a fierce, fast, straight storm that brought hurricane force winds and mass destruction to the area.  At the time, it didn't seem that bad to me.  I opened the curtain to watch the light show illuminate the trees swaying to the raucous tune of the wind.

I heard the staccato of the power going off and on but didn't think too much of it.  Brown outs and blown transformers during thunder storms are as much a part of summer in DC as concerts on the mall and the August mass migration of politicos.  

But then Saturday rolled around and no power . . . and Sunday . . . and Monday . . . and Tuesday . . . and now it's Wednesday morning and the last I checked, still no power in our neighborhood. 

This picture illustrates one of the reasons why.  Granted, it's not a very good picture but hey, I was snapping it as I was driving south in a north bound lane on Connecticut Avenue through Kensington as we were fleeing the apocalyptic chaos of Montgomery County for the promise land of a northern Virginia hotel.  (You know things are bad when those north of the Potomac willingly cross the river in search of comfort.)  But at least this gives you some sense of the chaos in that mile long stretch of a major thoroughfare in my neighborhood.  Although in this photo the trees have been somewhat cut up, they were still strewn across one whole side of the road and there were many more trees that hadn't been touched.  Nor did I get a picture of the downed utility poles, some broken in two, and wires that also littered the road.

So now my electronics are fully charged, I've slept through the night (and actually been a bit chilly while doing so) and am debating about whether or not to spend the holiday catching up on work or reading.  Although seriously, we all know reading is going to win out but I am thinking about work which should count for something. 

Good old Emily Dickinson.  When summer storms hit Amherst she didn't just think about work, she did it, retiring to her room to write more poetry.  No wondering what to do without Internet access or fretting about how much charge was left on her mobile and whether she should use it to update her Facebook status. 

I always tell myself that if I didn't have easy access to the distractions of modern life, I could write about lightning falling like dropped silverware from the heavens. But I didn't even manage to write my morning pages in the first few days, post-storm.  Technology, or lack thereof, isn't my problem, focus and self-discipline is.