Remains of the Storm ..

Look there. How calm those waters seem now that the season has turned. Only yesterday, they were savage seas. Churning violent storms and casting them our way. The vengeful east winds that crashed on our shores. Dancing dervish. As if they wanted to reclaim the land. To take it away to the sea. How they raged andplundered. How we waited and watched. Many days and many nights. And when it passed, we came out to gather the fallen pieces of our lives. To scavenge what the storm left behind. To mourn what it took.

The storm itself dissipated. Scattered itself across the land. Precipitated. Into a weeping autumn rain. Dissolved. Perhaps atoning for its sins.

Or maybe it simply wandered. Couldn't find its way back to the ocean. Who knows ?

Whirlwinds uncoiled on their vortex. Squalling over arid sands. Caught between nowhere and nothingness. The solitude of the desert drove them mad. Deranged, they shifted sand dunes by day - only to move them back by night.

Convectional crosscurrents ascended the firmament. Nothing remained of their wrath but a passing turbulence. Somewhere else, a translucent breeze touched land. It rippled golden through the tall seas of praire grass. Waxing-waning. Cresting-falling.

Some storms became winds. Some winds disintegrated. Into the cold drafts that condensed on your skin on muggy, moonless nights. Yet others, like tattered paper kites fluttered hapless from old telegraph wires. Gales rattled windows, crept in through cracks and settled in damp corners. Occassionally stirring but mostly silent. Fragments of air stood motionless. In suspended animation. As if they had died mid-sentence.

I collected them all. The fragile, broken pieces of a tempest dead. The consequence of sorrow. And its cause. Withered wafts surrendered themselves. I held them down with paperweights lest they should escape. They crumbled to ash between my fingertips. I inhaled every moving gust till my lungs could hold no more.

And I walked. I walked till the ocean found me. Till the tide drew in. It had waited long for the storm's return. Keeping vigil on the eastern sky. Hoping for the winds to ride back into the sunset. Water looked at me, questioningly. Melancholy waves leaped up and then subsided. They knew. They knew what the silence meant.

I stood there for a moment that was both brief and long at the same time. Reflecting. Reminiscing. Then I said a prayer. Exhaled deep. And in doing so I buried the remains of the storm. At sea.

-the girl.