Challenging Poetry

stormy weather

I never look for storms from the north.
Here, storms push in
from the southwest,
driving the wind before them,
building up lightning,
spiraling to uncanny power
and leaving devastation behind.

Once, the air darkened and roared
jet-plane loud as I dressed. The sirens
didn't even have time to sound
before it was gone again, taking
our power with it and closing
everything behind it.

I've heard the sirens sound
huddled in the center of the house
surrounded by cushions and
important things with the television
broadcasting the weatherman telling
my neighborhood—my street—that
it was here, and the wind drowns him out
before the power fails and we hold hands
and breathe together.

Once, in the winter, when nothing
stood between us and the north pole
but blizzards, a storm rolled in
from the north. And I shivered
at the wrongness of it.

April 7—“Play the opposites”—a theatre term I sometimes don’t like! But here I mean: do something unexpected in your poem, once or more than once. Any time you spot a cliché of feeling or of words, try its opposite, and somehow make it work!

This kind of went in a different place from where I thought it would and what the prompt was calling for. But this poem is what happened, today.