It was a clear night in which I was homesick
for a time when I didn’t think about
hurricanes monstering across the land,
when the ocean wasn’t warming
and kept to itself. Maybe I’m missing
a moment of imagined bliss
when I didn’t know all the ways
we were living were making
the water warm, making ice melt, turning
land into liquid, calling climate disasters
like bringing back the dead to take more dead,
it’s like with every exhaust-pumping-truck,
every oil rig, every cattle farm,
there is a deep-voiced invite to storm
that started with a grumble, now louder,
past growl, past shrieks, past calls for help,
onward to a summoning. Come great storm.
Come wash away our daily, our
cribs, our rattles, our bed pans,
our nine-to-fives, our traffic jams. Come storm,
for all we left. Come destruction, come
devastation, come tragedy. I call you forth
like we seem to do, all of us.
I call you without shame. Call you
until my call is piercing, head-pounding,
ear stinging, call until I imagine what it was before,
ache for something new, a world without
storms like these, when I’m homesick
for a time when we sat around a kitchen table
over tea, laughing, listening to rain fall outside,
welcoming it as part of the story not the ending.
—
Liza Wolff-Francis is the 8th Poet Laureate of Carrboro, NC. She has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She is a feminist ecopoet and has taught creative writing workshops for over a decade. Her writing has been widely anthologized and has most recently appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Walter Magazine, and Snapdragon. Her chapbook, Language of Crossing, is about the Mexico-U.S. border. She is the author of the full-length book, 48 hours down the shore (Kelsay Books).
