Ode to Helene in the Ides of March

Along with everyone who lives in this part of Western North Carolina, this week we are welcoming spring to the mountains. The shadblow is blowing, redbud is budding. It is the springtime after the hurricane, the renewal of the world after the destruction. Everything has looked different for a long time. The river banks are swept clear, there is very little underbrush anywhere, (it was all swept away). The winter, coming fast on the back of the storm was filled with more cold than usual, causing more die-back. Everywhere the landscape has been taken down to its bones. Now the political storm we are in strips away more of what we've grown used to. It seems we have a lot of trouble listening to what the earth, and history are trying to tell us. We don't always allow ourselves to think that all this rearrangement has vitality in it. But it does. both Helene and the political storm. I've been reading the Diaries of Thomas Mann 1918-1939, as he writes, at first incrementally, and then frantically about the rise of the Nazi regime. The diaries are in way the essential reading for the year. How unbeleiveable things happen, and how to learn to beleive. I've been writing about Mann's diaries and some poems about the storm. Look for more poems and essays coming here and on the wetcementpress.com website.

After the flood all the fence posts were wrapped and woven with leaves and branches. It was quite beautiful.