Rock 'Em Out

Hurricane in Halves

By the time half the hurricane had passed, nine candles
had pooled in their saucers,
the cypress split in two above the Toyota. Before they extinguished
I could barely read Robert Graves,
and in the diminishing flicker “groves” became “gloves”
and the Caslon wavered on the page.
So in my reading it appeared the sacred gloves had closed around oxygen,
had twisted the weather till the cypress split lengthwise.
In the other six hours the Romantic was carried upstairs
with the clothes and photos.
Birds blown from their nests were dizzy trying to recover,
our once local insects were entering Atlanta.
So maybe the Big Bang was believable after all, maybe an axiom
might be married to a stove, pitchfork to pine sap,
any stair might be cousin to a ladder and the wormhole near the sill
emerge near Aldebaran in Taurus.

By Allen Peterson


Recent print and online appearances include: Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Bat City, Salamander, Iron Horse, Qarrtsiluni, Innisfree, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB8HudfbaTE

For my song i chose Rock You Like a Hurricane by The Scorpians. This song relates to my poem because each of them talk about the effects of a hurricane. In the poem it is describing things that are happening during the actual time a hurricane is occuring. In the song, it is telling what a hurricane can and will do to you if you are so unfortunate to be in the way of one. It also explains the destruction that one will bring to anything in its path while it reeks havic on anything and everything. Both of these examples show the horror and disarray that would be caused by a hurricane that was anywhere near the place you are located.