Houses in Haiti

After walls shook to cracks
or fell in heaps,
blue plastic tent-towns
bloomed in open fields.

Who has now decided
tents should vanish,
“temporary homes” revert
to scarred land or naked hillsides?

Home calls them in their sleep.
A perilous walk takes them
back to those familiar walls,
still askew, plaster crumbling.

How can they bear this risk?
Who will brace the doorframe,
secure the roof? Who cares enough
to save their battered souls?

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From book “To Remember, To Hope”
2012 Blurb.com Bookstore

At Sitka

A girl spots debris washing up
from thousands of miles away,
a floating mass drifting in
from the dark sea.

Deep blue waters hide
earth’s silent tectonic plates,
those trays of solid mass ready
to slip again, to crash with rage,

forcing the predictable sea
into a freakish spout,
that falls to smack
giant waves into nearest land:

a shore of fishing harbors,
a shore of tidy homes,
a shore of shops and schools,
stripping them of their innards:

their dishes, their beds, books,
tires, tools and boats,
clutter then rushing to sea,
a tsunami bringing its baggage

to Alaska, cluttering pristine
island coasts, stirred into a soup
of too-quickly melting glaciers.
She runs, screaming.

____________
3rd prize winner, 2012
CURRENT, Ann Arbor, MI
____________
From book “To Remember, To Hope”
2012 Blurb.com Bookstore