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This poem was written to celebrate the first named Storm Lady, about a year ago, so perhaps it is still appropriate now.
Storm Ladies
Storm Lady Immogen hammers our doors and our windows
it’s the fault of Aeolus for letting her out of his bag
and our fault as well, for tattooing a name on her
innocent shoulder.
Is she tempted to blow as when all Suffolk’s windmills
indignantly groaned into flame, with their arms madly whirling,
ripped oaks out like sprout stems, demolishing church-towers and drowning
some eight thousand sailors?
‘A once-in-five-hundred-year tempest,’ could blow up again, any minute.
because Gaia’s provoked, or a force generated at random ?
Either way we can’t see, cannot draw, this fierce air that we picture as sinister
isobars, sliding and clenching.
“But I love wind” you say, and we know what you mean is
the scent on spring breezes and bracing brown gusts in the autumn
that whirl leaves round our heads and throw rooks like old rags round the sky
But beware what you love, for
the Wind-God has ungentle daughters, his feline avengers:
watch out for a day which is still, with the grass hardly moving,
when we peer through the pane, and we ask ourselves
‘What is that roaring?’
02 2016
