Hurricane Poems: ‘The Genesis Wind’ and Other Poetry by Brian Yapko

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The Genesis Wind

—written in the wake of Hurricane Milton

I close my eyes to better gauge the gusting wind.
It howls and tantrums hard against the metal shutters
And bends the flailing palms and scrub oaks. Then I find
It deadens into ghastly silence. My heart flutters
Within my trembling chest. The Eye’s arrived at last—
That vast negation, pregnant with harsh devastation.
I wish it could announce to me which wounds are past—
What it has spared, what’s yet consigned to condemnation.

The Eye! The dreaded Eye! The cold heart of the gale
Which augurs windswept agony through Nature’s torment,
Which ‘spite its acid calm should fulminate and rail…
But it brings deadly silence—dangerously dormant.
Enough, I cry! Before I lose my mind, resume
Your fierce jihad of diabolic ruination!
Its dead calm deepens. Will this house become my tomb?
Or could this baleful quietude bespeak salvation?

I wait. The violent winds shall all-too-soon return.
Unbidden I recall a time when I was eight
And played beneath a churning sky without concern
As I watched massive cloud on cloud accumulate.
The winds picked up. I waved my arms like a propeller!
But then my parents screamed that I must run inside;
A siren blared. They yanked me in and down the cellar
And tried to lock out Death. I grew so scared I cried.

This grim-tense quiet now is what I heard back then
When voices bleakly rasped about tornadic might
Through mustard-yellow skies and pounding hail. And when
The danger passed I watched my mother sob from fright.
I haven’t thought about that storm in many years
Where solid trees had been uprooted, roofs destroyed
From winds so focused that it seemed they cut like shears
And left a trail of ruins and a weeping void.

But now I live in Florida. Yes, I’ve grown old,
And hurricanes are just a part of tropic life—
The cost of dwelling where it seldom gets too cold;
The price of giving up the bleed of urban strife…
But wait! The Eye is passed. I hear the winds resume—
A growing, rumbling roar with near atomic force.
The County sends a text: Seek out an inner room
For shelter till the cyclone winds have run their course.

The world stands on a razor’s edge. I look for signs
And hear the windows quake. I pray the roof will hold.
I hear explosions from the nearby power lines.
I scarcely breathe with every jagged minute tolled
And when I think it’s peaked the tempest gets still worse.
I fear the kamikaze wind will heave the sea
Into the streets. A kraken wreaks Poseidon’s curse!
The lights go dark just as I hear a crashing tree.

Such sounds are heard when distant galaxies are born
Amid strange streaking lights and brute cyclonic gyres!
And here? Might life be born anew though ripped and torn?
Might unclean things be purified in holy fires?
I fear the whirlwind could bring death if that is willed,
But glimpse the icons of my saints by candlelight
And trust we’ll live beyond this night. We can rebuild.
And now? The wind is dying. All will soon be right.

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God of Second Chances 

—a rondeau redouble

Can we rebuild what was destroyed
And see restored the world we’ve lost?
There is a force beyond the void
Which we ignore at dreadful cost.

When all seems crushed and tempest-tossed,
When rectitude seems ore alloyed
To crumbling rust and sterile frost,
Can we rebuild what was destroyed?

Though fame seems something to avoid,
And wealth a prize that’s over-glossed,
We might yet find hope redeployed
And see restored the world we’ve lost.

Why should we race and then exhaust
Ourselves in pointless schadenfreude?
Accept—not just on Pentecost—
There is a force beyond the void.

Philosophy has failed or cloyed
And science serves but to accost.
Deep truths exist past Locke and Freud
Which we ignore at dreadful cost.

Prize truth. Repudiate George Floyd.
Restore the morals once embossed
In stone. Once Order’s reemployed
We can set right the lines we’ve crossed.
__We can rebuild.

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Brian Yapko is a retired lawyer whose poetry has appeared in over fifty journals.  He is the winner of the 2023 SCP International Poetry Competition. Brian is also the author of several short stories, the science fiction novel El Nuevo Mundo and the gothic archaeological novel  Bleeding Stone.  He lives in Wimauma, Florida.