When Creation Roars--a Disaster Poem

The Earth is not domesticated....

Photo by sippakorn yamkasikorn on Unsplash

There’s nothing like a natural disaster to bring us to our knees. In case you’ve missed the news or haven’t yet connected the news with Western North Carolina new threat, let me share the news. Our little mountain town is now on high alert for raging fires blazing in the beauty of the natural world.

Just a few months ago, the hurricane ravaged the forests and valley floors. Now, the Earth is being scorched with fire nearby.

How quickly our lives change. Who has the bandwidth to be so disrupted? Who has time to live with such an interruption to life itself?

Are humans the only living thing that senses such danger? Surely the black bears know something is very wrong. Surely the bluebirds are concerned. What about the humming birds who are expected to arrive now any day?

The trauma cells in me are on high alert sensing that this new wildfire is linked to the two other traumatic and deadly wildfires we have lived through in our own lives. We experienced this some years back, when we lived in Colorado and were front row witnesses to the sheer power of a natural disaster that seemed “not natural” at all in our life of beauty and peace filled places.

A disaster is an interruption to our lives at the soul level. Physically we feel threatened. Soufully, we feel shaken. Put together, we are a mess…again. While we are not in danger now, our church friends just texted that they have high tailed it down the mountain pass to flee and are now evacuated. They will hear soon if their house is destroyed.

Some of you know this trauma.

I sat down this morning with my window faced directly in the view of the rising smoke and rising anxiety. The blue sky is currently fading now to gray smoke. These words came out—words of an honest lament and confession of vulnerability.

Pray for the the First Responders. Pray for those whose minds have not yet recovered from the hurricane in the fall. Somewhere in the world today, others are facing the threat of something bad. Will our theology allow us to pray for the bears?

It is all a reminder that we are but dust holding glory in our veins.

My poems are the most real way I know how to live these days. My poems are where my soul interscets with the world. When I get still, I feel something moving in me. I pay attention. I turn to curiosity. I dip the ladel into my soul and what comes out some mornings, are these poems.

This is my poem about natural disasters.

This is my poem about the black bears who are fleeing as I write these words. This is my poem about the cardinals who are in flight; the eagles in the smokey air flying out of range and most of all my fellow human beings who are on high alert and some in harms way. This is my poem about the robin who just laid three pale blue eggs in her nest in the forest, now on fire. This is my poem about my friends who were evacuated just a few hours ago. This is my poem about the stuff my friends could not pack into their overstuffed car as they sped off to saftey.

Perhaps me, writing a poem, is my own way of staying aware of the world around me—paying attention and putting some words together that might express some rumblings in many of us who face disaster and threats of the wildness of Mother Earth.

Writing a poem is my own way of paying attention. It is my own way of praying. In some way, I hope this poem might help someone, some day, in some place under seize and threathened by the roar of creation.