Blog: Summer Severities

This hottest summer in history haunts me, by day, by night. 

There is no escaping its multiple realities, although the world is doing its very best to try.

Officially, this is the worst drought in the middle of our country in fifty years.  Many professionals compare 2012's combination of searing heat and waterless weeks to the time of the Dust Bowl in the 1930's. 

The daughter of a colleague could not fly home for Fathers' Day because dust grounded Phoenix, Ariz. airplanes... This was not mentioned in our local papers.

In the face of 'seas' of bloody red, indicating severe drought, submerging climate maps, a poet's response is inevitable.

SUMMER SEVERITIES

we are supposed to be having

a really violent thunderstorm

any minute now

again

screens fill with

auditory and visual

alarums

klaxons worse

than Nazis'

we are warned

of winds over 70

"damaging hail"

"dangerous cloud-to-ground lightning"

again

and requested to call

the National Weather Service

I can imagine

the response

in reality

we are having

a very violent drought

bottoms of Indiana reservoirs

are cracked

and green

corn in our own New Jersey fields

attempts to ripen

on brown-tinged stalks

nobody anywhere

is responding

                                       Carolyn Foote Edelmann

                                        Summer 2012