Hurricane Season - July 2 2024

 

Hurricane Season

July 2 2024



Is coming earlier

lasting longer.

And all you can do

is hope a butterfly’s wings

flapping lazily

in the Indonesian littoral

or off the Florida Keys

will make the wind veer a few degrees

and cause someone else the grief

of landfall.

Cause and effect

confound us all,

because there is no telling how

no proportionality.

So despite illusions of agency,

we are, in the end, all fatalists,

who cannot control events

let alone the weather.

And on a warming planet

there will surely be more of them.

Hurricanes

that will be longer, and more intense,

will be assigned anodyne names

like Sally, Flossy, Floyd

that only make them seem

comprehensible.

And if not a hurricane

then some other existential threat

even harder to predict.

So even here

on this small knuckle of land

walled-in by the sea

we thought would be protected

by its insignificance,

there is no such thing as a refuge

exempt from fate.

Because as the poet once said

no man is an island, entire of itself.

And because we are all butterflies,

flitting through air

on gossamer wings

at the mercy of the elements,

the whim

of blind contingency.

An indifferent sea

and winds too strong to measure.