right hand pointing

 

     
  Hurricane Watch

Helen Losse
 

 


 

Two hurricanes past: Charley and Frances.
A third is yet to come.  The tropical islands,
drenched already, count various losses.
Floridians brace for another deep rain,

but Ivan heads instead toward New Orleans,
where flowing booze makes jazz king,
yearly, the Catholics wear beads and masks.
It misses—making landfall close but elsewhere.

We live off to the north—a hundred miles from
the sea.  The wind and the sun and deciduous trees
paint an Indian-summer here.  Clouds roll in
like huge erasers:  Eerie, and long before the rain.

Meanwhile, dancing-shadows bob and twinkle:
The eye of today is its sunlight.
Silver jewels, like the white-hot stars in the
blowing grass, are coming and then going.

 

 

 

  

Helen Losse is a poet and free lance writer with recent poetry publications or acceptances in Facets: A Literary Magazine, Black Bear Review, Rearview Quarterly, Tacenda, TimBookTu, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Blink, Domicile, Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, The Verb, Cold Glass, The Bohemian Rag, Sacramento Poetry, Art, and Music, Poets Against the War, Voices in Wartime, anthologies in the UK, and a micro-chapbook, Absolution, in the POEMS-FOR-ALL Series from 24th Street Irregular Press. Her chapbook, Gathering the Broken Pieces, is available through FootHills Publishing. She also writes book reviews for the Winston-Salem Journal.