photo from LA wildfire (Taskforce 1600)Disaster Sonnets by Margaret Coats The Society March 22, 2025 Beauty, Culture, Poetry 23 Comments . How Many Homes? —January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires Twelve thousand lost, from stricken memories more Schools, churches, meeting places, shops and homes Of residents and others moved away, Bereaved of yesterday disastrously. The concrete evidence that life was lived In cool or agonizing passageways Lies toxic waste in space outlined by streets Or canyons where five conflagrations soared. Somehow the squalid ash will be restored, Determined voices passionately say, Charred trash be cleared for rooms where changed life roams, Not left for stranger homesites unexplored. The bygone panoramas negatived Had angels waiting in the wings before. . . How Many Souls? ―control tower voice moments after midair collision January 29, 2025 May God have mercy on unready souls, Trusting to the air, with casual prayer, Two aircraft on the way to Washington, Families to be severed in the river, Students, hunters, skaters unaware . . . My God, my God, could one have been my son, Dead in Potomac chill without a shiver? Unconcerned with whether they had sinned, Frightful flashes passing at warp speed: Could these have been enough to redirect Minds hurtling downward through unthreatening wind? The crash, the shock of unaccompanied Split seconds for the desperate intellect Incapable of rounding out existence. . . Margaret Coats lives in California. She holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University. She has retired from a career of teaching literature, languages, and writing that included considerable work in homeschooling for her own family and others. NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets. The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary. 23 Responses Roy Eugene Peterson March 22, 2025 Margaet, these are two lachrymose poems of two recent terrible events that seared the soul of our nation. The first memorializes the highly destructive California wildfires along with the perspective for rebuilding. The second disaster is perfectly punctuated by the frightening thought of the possibility of a loved one being on board one of the flights. When I was in training to be an Army Attache in Moscow, on January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the Potomac River after taking off from what was then Washington National Airport. That plane struck the 14th Street Bridge just a few miles from the White House, crushing multiple cars and killing four motorists. Seventy of the passengers and four of the five crew members aboard the Boeing 737 also were killed. I happened to be living in an apartment in Rosslyn, Virginia at the time within a few hundred yards of the crash. The reason for the crash was ice on the wings. I thought at the time the plane could have struck our apartment building. Coincidentally, a person I knew from a nearby town in West Texas, Roger Pettit, was the copilot. I had played sports against him. The randomness of such events is my point, and I believe coincides with one of the points you made. Your rhyme scheme was fascinating and creatively unusual requiring considerable thought, though with your intellect and verbal capabilities much easier for you. Reply Margaret Coats March 22, 2025 Thanks for your comment, Roy, and may God have mercy on your acquaintance Roger Pettit. The Air Florida crash in 1982 has also entered American collective memory, so I recall that the only crew member who survived was a stewardess pulled out of the Potomac by a young government employee who jumped into the freezing waters on the chance he could save one injured person before himself being incapacitated by the cold. I have heard a talk given by a surviving passenger who managed to grasp a line let down by a helicopter, and to scoop up a woman he knew would be unable to hold onto it. When they got to a hospital, it turned out the man had many broken bones. He never entirely recovered, but lived to tell! I wrote the midair collision sonnet the night of the event, trying for some rhyming lines, but also thinking I could revise the rhyme scheme later. Though I did change information as the passenger list came out during following days, every rhyme word published here comes from the unplanned draft. The scheme is xabcabc defdefx. Unrhymed lines are x. The turn comes exactly at the halfway point. Thoughts of my son came up not so much because he lives in Kansas City (different airport than Wichita where the fallen airliner had originated), but because he was in a near-disaster while flying to college. Heard a noise, looked out the window, and saw the nearest jet engine in flames! Thanks be to God, the plane made a safe emergency landing. You are right that events like this are random from our point of view. And more frightening when we imagine the possibility of self or friends or loved ones being involved. Glad Air Florida 90 missed your apartment building! Reply Jeremiah Johnson March 22, 2025 Margaret, “the shock of unaccompanied Split seconds for the desperate intellect Incapable of rounding out existence.” Makes me think about the old cliche, “My life flashed before my eyes!” Is that even possible? You rephrase the concept beautifully! P.S. – I’m sure you’ve read this before, but, in regards to your first sonnet, I couldn’t help thinking of Bradstreet’s poem on the burning of her home: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43707/verses-upon-the-burning-of-our-house-july-10th-1666 Reply Paul A. Freeman March 22, 2025 I guessed from the date of the fire, 1666, that the poem referred to The Great Fire of London, but that was two months after Anne Bradstreet’s house burned down! Reply Margaret Coats March 23, 2025 And her house was on the other side of the Atlantic! Paul A. Freeman March 23, 2025 Oh, that I didn’t know. Margaret Coats March 23, 2025 Thanks, Jeremiah, for your praise and for bringing up the Anne Bradstreet poem. She expresses many of the feelings we’ve heard again and again from Angelenos who lost everything except life and family. As for life flashing before one’s eyes in a disaster moment, I’ll say that both my son and I, who’ve been in separate planes that could have crashed a few years apart, experienced something different. Rather than go through my past, I was thinking what can I do now, and what should I do now, that I may have only seconds left? The answer is pray. My son did what I think is more typical for a much younger adult: he thought of the future, did not believe the disaster would happen to him even though it could have been imminent, and hoped himself out of it. Of course neither of us had reached the point where disaster seemed certain. One thing I did learn is that air disasters do NOT happen as an instant, painless disappearance from existence. There is a thud or a jolt, fear and concern conveyed among passengers, bracing and waiting for what’s next, and motion of the plane in response to the storm or mechanical failure or collision with something. Even the explosion that occurred on January 29 took time to reach all parts of the plane. It broke into pieces salvaged by workers on the ground. The bodies were recovered and identified–not entirely incinerated. I tried to imagine the final moments that–in my experience that was not final–passed seemingly in slow motion. Reply Joseph S. Salemi March 22, 2025 I was going to say that the rhyming in both sonnets is “sporadic,” but on closer inspection and re-reading I’d have to change that to “intricate.” What happens is that one gets a sense of the open-endedness of blank verse, but conjoined with a subliminal suggestion of rhyme, like a lingering scent of perfume. Does it work? Well, yes… Margaret makes it work. All I can say is that it must have taken exactly the kind of effort to make this intricate rhyming pattern as it would to make the more expected ABAB or ABBA rhymes. But because the subject of both sonnets is “disaster” and human loss, what Margaret has done is more acceptable than rhyme regularity. Reply Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Thank you, Joe. You’re right that I approached the subject with recognition that a few unrhymed lines, at least, would be appropriate. Rhyme regularity is fitting, for example, in an elegy for the deceased, where the point is consolation for a catastrophe. And blank verse works for disaster. Still, in “How Many Homes?” I wanted to touch on restoration in rhyme. As you may notice, rhyming only begins in the sestet of that sonnet. Rebuilding has become a sharply contentious issue, with passionately determined voices loudly heard as permits to clear are issued far too slowly. A recent article in The Nation added fat to this fire by declaring some of Los Angeles will remain uninhabitable, while in other areas, it’s either “socialism or barbarism.” The writer says it is not market-profitable to house low income or even working class persons, meaning that if government socialism does not do whatever rebuilding is to be done, we will have lawless gangs governing illicit structures and encampments. Unhappy prospect for us all! Reply Paul A. Freeman March 22, 2025 These two tragedies were almost overshadowed by political point-scoring. Thanks for bringing us back to the human impact of these disasters, Margaret. ‘Dead in Potomac chill without a shiver?’ and ‘Incapable of rounding out existence.’ were two out of many affecting lines. These must have been two difficult poems to write. Well done, and thank you, for tackling the subjects so effectively. Reply Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Thank you for your comments, Paul. Taking note of disasters with major human impact is not easy. In essence, that’s because so much more is involved than in every outbreak of the continual (but expected) conflicts over politics. To me, the amount of possible material and the huge variety of potential approaches to my subjects here are so daunting that I thought for a while I would give up on the fires. Then came the air crash and the sonnet I wrote quickly while seeking explanations (see what I said to Roy above). That made me select an angle on the fires, and move ahead more quickly than the city of Los Angeles will be able to do! Reply Warren Bonham March 23, 2025 This was a very somber way to wake-up for me today, but I’m very glad that someone as skilled as you is keeping these tragic events fresh in our minds. It’s too easy to quickly move on when we’re not touched directly. Reply Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Thanks, Warren. And thank God I wasn’t touched directly by either fires or plane crash. The regional network around Los Angeles is, however, so massive that most of us alive today won’t be able to leave the 2025 fires behind. Evacuees are still camping with friends or relatives. Glad I was able to make a simple statement on behalf of all involved in both disasters. Reply Julian D. Woodruff March 23, 2025 Margaret, these are breathlessly immediate, as if they coalesced in your mind at the scene. I grasped your rhyme scheme for “Souls?” and took the lack of rhyme in the 1st and last lines as a sort of framing device. This impression was reinforced by seeing that those 2 lines can be (and were probably intended to be) read successively as one petition. And that petition seems the main thrust of the poem, with the inner lines providing both the “what” and the “why.” Reply Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Thank you, Julian. I’m glad I was able to put immediacy into these pieces. And I’m very glad to have your perception on the structure of “How Many Souls?” I did not think of the first and last line in that poem as one petition, but your doing so proves my longstanding point that readers can add interpretations to the good understanding of a poem, rather than merely puzzle out what an author intended them to find. It’s there in my words, but it took you to find it! Reply Cheryl A Corey March 23, 2025 I think that it’s difficult to capture the enormity of catastrophic events – where does one begin? – but you achieve it skillfully. Reply Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Thanks, Cheryl. It’s true that beginning is a prime difficulty. The little I achieved here leaves immense scope for artists of all kinds, and I’m sure the Angeleno arts community is at work concerning the fires. Reply C.B. Anderson March 23, 2025 When life sucks, Death is a mercy, But when death rules There’s no controversy. Reply Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Mors domina, nemo murmurat. The most alliterative motto I could make, C. B. Thanks for your versified response serving as challenging inspiration! Reply Shamik Banerjee March 24, 2025 The news was extremely appalling. Sitting here in India, I was thinking about all those returning to their houses only to find them pulverised. Your sonnets replayed in me that shock and sorrow of those days. You are an incredible wordsmith, Margaret. Reply Daniel Howard March 24, 2025 I really enjoyed the rhyming scheme of both sonnets, especially the first, which, if I have represented it correctly, reads: ABCxDyzEECBEDA. The rhyming of the first and last lines unifies the opening and apparantly blank verse with the rhyme scheme that follows. The latter is all the more pleasant to the ear because of its surprise and its musicality (especially the unanticipated third appearance of the E rhyme). It raises interesting questions about your style of composition i.e. whether you normally write lines, intended for a traditional stanza, without thinking too much about how they would fit into to a given rhyming structure. Reply Debra L Barone March 24, 2025 Thank you, Margaret, for this moving memorial to the lives lost and lives forever changed by these two disasters. Reply Laura Deagon March 24, 2025 Margaret, the juxtaposition of the words “Disaster” & “Sonnets” of your introduction definitely prepared me to expect a whirlwind of visual images with your poems. The 2 disasters are touchingly memorialized by you. If only the disasters were fiction. Very sad. With my inexperience with poetry, I always associated the word sonnet with something pleasant or flowery. Here, it has a sting to it. Reply Leave a Reply Cancel ReplyYour email address will not be published.CommentName* Email* Website Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Roy Eugene Peterson March 22, 2025 Margaet, these are two lachrymose poems of two recent terrible events that seared the soul of our nation. The first memorializes the highly destructive California wildfires along with the perspective for rebuilding. The second disaster is perfectly punctuated by the frightening thought of the possibility of a loved one being on board one of the flights. When I was in training to be an Army Attache in Moscow, on January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the Potomac River after taking off from what was then Washington National Airport. That plane struck the 14th Street Bridge just a few miles from the White House, crushing multiple cars and killing four motorists. Seventy of the passengers and four of the five crew members aboard the Boeing 737 also were killed. I happened to be living in an apartment in Rosslyn, Virginia at the time within a few hundred yards of the crash. The reason for the crash was ice on the wings. I thought at the time the plane could have struck our apartment building. Coincidentally, a person I knew from a nearby town in West Texas, Roger Pettit, was the copilot. I had played sports against him. The randomness of such events is my point, and I believe coincides with one of the points you made. Your rhyme scheme was fascinating and creatively unusual requiring considerable thought, though with your intellect and verbal capabilities much easier for you. Reply
Margaret Coats March 22, 2025 Thanks for your comment, Roy, and may God have mercy on your acquaintance Roger Pettit. The Air Florida crash in 1982 has also entered American collective memory, so I recall that the only crew member who survived was a stewardess pulled out of the Potomac by a young government employee who jumped into the freezing waters on the chance he could save one injured person before himself being incapacitated by the cold. I have heard a talk given by a surviving passenger who managed to grasp a line let down by a helicopter, and to scoop up a woman he knew would be unable to hold onto it. When they got to a hospital, it turned out the man had many broken bones. He never entirely recovered, but lived to tell! I wrote the midair collision sonnet the night of the event, trying for some rhyming lines, but also thinking I could revise the rhyme scheme later. Though I did change information as the passenger list came out during following days, every rhyme word published here comes from the unplanned draft. The scheme is xabcabc defdefx. Unrhymed lines are x. The turn comes exactly at the halfway point. Thoughts of my son came up not so much because he lives in Kansas City (different airport than Wichita where the fallen airliner had originated), but because he was in a near-disaster while flying to college. Heard a noise, looked out the window, and saw the nearest jet engine in flames! Thanks be to God, the plane made a safe emergency landing. You are right that events like this are random from our point of view. And more frightening when we imagine the possibility of self or friends or loved ones being involved. Glad Air Florida 90 missed your apartment building! Reply
Jeremiah Johnson March 22, 2025 Margaret, “the shock of unaccompanied Split seconds for the desperate intellect Incapable of rounding out existence.” Makes me think about the old cliche, “My life flashed before my eyes!” Is that even possible? You rephrase the concept beautifully! P.S. – I’m sure you’ve read this before, but, in regards to your first sonnet, I couldn’t help thinking of Bradstreet’s poem on the burning of her home: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43707/verses-upon-the-burning-of-our-house-july-10th-1666 Reply
Paul A. Freeman March 22, 2025 I guessed from the date of the fire, 1666, that the poem referred to The Great Fire of London, but that was two months after Anne Bradstreet’s house burned down! Reply
Margaret Coats March 23, 2025 Thanks, Jeremiah, for your praise and for bringing up the Anne Bradstreet poem. She expresses many of the feelings we’ve heard again and again from Angelenos who lost everything except life and family. As for life flashing before one’s eyes in a disaster moment, I’ll say that both my son and I, who’ve been in separate planes that could have crashed a few years apart, experienced something different. Rather than go through my past, I was thinking what can I do now, and what should I do now, that I may have only seconds left? The answer is pray. My son did what I think is more typical for a much younger adult: he thought of the future, did not believe the disaster would happen to him even though it could have been imminent, and hoped himself out of it. Of course neither of us had reached the point where disaster seemed certain. One thing I did learn is that air disasters do NOT happen as an instant, painless disappearance from existence. There is a thud or a jolt, fear and concern conveyed among passengers, bracing and waiting for what’s next, and motion of the plane in response to the storm or mechanical failure or collision with something. Even the explosion that occurred on January 29 took time to reach all parts of the plane. It broke into pieces salvaged by workers on the ground. The bodies were recovered and identified–not entirely incinerated. I tried to imagine the final moments that–in my experience that was not final–passed seemingly in slow motion. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi March 22, 2025 I was going to say that the rhyming in both sonnets is “sporadic,” but on closer inspection and re-reading I’d have to change that to “intricate.” What happens is that one gets a sense of the open-endedness of blank verse, but conjoined with a subliminal suggestion of rhyme, like a lingering scent of perfume. Does it work? Well, yes… Margaret makes it work. All I can say is that it must have taken exactly the kind of effort to make this intricate rhyming pattern as it would to make the more expected ABAB or ABBA rhymes. But because the subject of both sonnets is “disaster” and human loss, what Margaret has done is more acceptable than rhyme regularity. Reply
Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Thank you, Joe. You’re right that I approached the subject with recognition that a few unrhymed lines, at least, would be appropriate. Rhyme regularity is fitting, for example, in an elegy for the deceased, where the point is consolation for a catastrophe. And blank verse works for disaster. Still, in “How Many Homes?” I wanted to touch on restoration in rhyme. As you may notice, rhyming only begins in the sestet of that sonnet. Rebuilding has become a sharply contentious issue, with passionately determined voices loudly heard as permits to clear are issued far too slowly. A recent article in The Nation added fat to this fire by declaring some of Los Angeles will remain uninhabitable, while in other areas, it’s either “socialism or barbarism.” The writer says it is not market-profitable to house low income or even working class persons, meaning that if government socialism does not do whatever rebuilding is to be done, we will have lawless gangs governing illicit structures and encampments. Unhappy prospect for us all! Reply
Paul A. Freeman March 22, 2025 These two tragedies were almost overshadowed by political point-scoring. Thanks for bringing us back to the human impact of these disasters, Margaret. ‘Dead in Potomac chill without a shiver?’ and ‘Incapable of rounding out existence.’ were two out of many affecting lines. These must have been two difficult poems to write. Well done, and thank you, for tackling the subjects so effectively. Reply
Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Thank you for your comments, Paul. Taking note of disasters with major human impact is not easy. In essence, that’s because so much more is involved than in every outbreak of the continual (but expected) conflicts over politics. To me, the amount of possible material and the huge variety of potential approaches to my subjects here are so daunting that I thought for a while I would give up on the fires. Then came the air crash and the sonnet I wrote quickly while seeking explanations (see what I said to Roy above). That made me select an angle on the fires, and move ahead more quickly than the city of Los Angeles will be able to do! Reply
Warren Bonham March 23, 2025 This was a very somber way to wake-up for me today, but I’m very glad that someone as skilled as you is keeping these tragic events fresh in our minds. It’s too easy to quickly move on when we’re not touched directly. Reply
Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Thanks, Warren. And thank God I wasn’t touched directly by either fires or plane crash. The regional network around Los Angeles is, however, so massive that most of us alive today won’t be able to leave the 2025 fires behind. Evacuees are still camping with friends or relatives. Glad I was able to make a simple statement on behalf of all involved in both disasters. Reply
Julian D. Woodruff March 23, 2025 Margaret, these are breathlessly immediate, as if they coalesced in your mind at the scene. I grasped your rhyme scheme for “Souls?” and took the lack of rhyme in the 1st and last lines as a sort of framing device. This impression was reinforced by seeing that those 2 lines can be (and were probably intended to be) read successively as one petition. And that petition seems the main thrust of the poem, with the inner lines providing both the “what” and the “why.” Reply
Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Thank you, Julian. I’m glad I was able to put immediacy into these pieces. And I’m very glad to have your perception on the structure of “How Many Souls?” I did not think of the first and last line in that poem as one petition, but your doing so proves my longstanding point that readers can add interpretations to the good understanding of a poem, rather than merely puzzle out what an author intended them to find. It’s there in my words, but it took you to find it! Reply
Cheryl A Corey March 23, 2025 I think that it’s difficult to capture the enormity of catastrophic events – where does one begin? – but you achieve it skillfully. Reply
Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Thanks, Cheryl. It’s true that beginning is a prime difficulty. The little I achieved here leaves immense scope for artists of all kinds, and I’m sure the Angeleno arts community is at work concerning the fires. Reply
C.B. Anderson March 23, 2025 When life sucks, Death is a mercy, But when death rules There’s no controversy. Reply
Margaret Coats March 24, 2025 Mors domina, nemo murmurat. The most alliterative motto I could make, C. B. Thanks for your versified response serving as challenging inspiration! Reply
Shamik Banerjee March 24, 2025 The news was extremely appalling. Sitting here in India, I was thinking about all those returning to their houses only to find them pulverised. Your sonnets replayed in me that shock and sorrow of those days. You are an incredible wordsmith, Margaret. Reply
Daniel Howard March 24, 2025 I really enjoyed the rhyming scheme of both sonnets, especially the first, which, if I have represented it correctly, reads: ABCxDyzEECBEDA. The rhyming of the first and last lines unifies the opening and apparantly blank verse with the rhyme scheme that follows. The latter is all the more pleasant to the ear because of its surprise and its musicality (especially the unanticipated third appearance of the E rhyme). It raises interesting questions about your style of composition i.e. whether you normally write lines, intended for a traditional stanza, without thinking too much about how they would fit into to a given rhyming structure. Reply
Debra L Barone March 24, 2025 Thank you, Margaret, for this moving memorial to the lives lost and lives forever changed by these two disasters. Reply
Laura Deagon March 24, 2025 Margaret, the juxtaposition of the words “Disaster” & “Sonnets” of your introduction definitely prepared me to expect a whirlwind of visual images with your poems. The 2 disasters are touchingly memorialized by you. If only the disasters were fiction. Very sad. With my inexperience with poetry, I always associated the word sonnet with something pleasant or flowery. Here, it has a sting to it. Reply
