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Uprooted and Broken


John L. Stanizzi

Oh, that this lashing wind was something more
Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter ...

...The rain is pouring down. It is July.
There is lightning and the thickest thunder.
It is a spectacle...
            -Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion
            -Wallace Stevens

The place on the lawn where the tree had stood
is empty now,
after the wind indeed lashed everything at once,
turning the landscape inside out as birds huddled on branches,
the garden bowed a deep and fearful bow,
and the thick rain bashed its pocked face again and again
in a rage against the windows;
the pounding wind stripped the countryside,
this time filling the air with willow limbs, tattered leaves,
lawn chairs and flower pots, and how do we take it all?
What do we make of this apparent atmospheric effrontery?
Only what we can,
with our feeble sensibility,
weak and impudent at once.
This fierce gray storm is being done to us.
We are insulted and afraid
as we crouch in the stairwell
and duck under the lightning
scrawling its sizzling autograph
all around us in the air,
and as the storm squeezes a darkness
through the cracks
of the house at midday,
we decide, without thinking, to ignore the sun,
which will illuminate the place on the lawn
where the tree had stood
until we are ready to begin again.

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