Best Natural Disastershouse Poems
Joplin Missouri, May 22, 2011
It came out of the western sky they say
In darkest dark before the morning day
The wind, then rain, then calm, then came the storm
The trees, the cars, the house all in deform
For Joplin and the people of this town
This storm has left them all on shaky ground
For looters who go searching they attest
The court will issue warrants of arrest
The debris field is guarded by the cops
The searching goes on till the death toll stops
A babe was pulled right from a lady’s arms
A house was spared it leveled all their barns
The people huddled in their cellar rooms
For some it just became their final tombs
Then came the light the storm was finally past
And rescuers could get to work at last
They set to work to search out every pile
Of cars and trees all heaped along each mile
The hospital had taken quite a hit
The doctors all still worked in spite of it
They set up tents to treat the injured folks
For broken bones on up to major strokes
The paper said the storm registered four
The paper said the deaths could rise some more
The TV said that most the town was gone
The people of the town would carry on
8th place finish in contest.
The assignment - "Poetry Assignment# Form: ((15 set or more )) Heroic_Couplets
Poetry ~~ Category: Natural Disaster, business, passion, and art ~ Title: * Public
Warrant *"
If I understand the form; it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming
pairs of iambic pentameter lines and iambic pentameter lines are lines with 10
syllables with each grouping of two syllables having stress on only one of the
syllables. I am not sure if I got this exactly as assigned. It was hard to do and took
some time to come up with what I entered. Do I have enough lines or should there
be more? I am probably too late as I did not find the assignement soon enough
and had a bit of chemo side effects to contend with along the way.
It's four a.m. you are sound asleep
when you are awakened suddenly
at first it is a small vibration, then
turns into a house shaking event
You scramble to find purchase on the floor
but you can't seem to find balance
you hear the crashing of pictures
as they fall from the wall to the tile below
As you bounce from wall to wall, frantic
you try to reach your children, who are now
Screaming for you in high pitched madness
as a crack forms in the wall, then the floor
The shaking, now so violent, the sound
so terrifyingly loud, you reach them
only to find a jammed door, you shoulder
it open, grab your children, Now,
How do we get out? wheres my wife?
you stumble down the stairs, half of which
are now broken, to find that the front door
is gone, so is the living room, decimated
Where's my wife? where's the dog?
You are now outside where you fall
the violence is all around you, devistation
beyond the imagination, though it is dark
Where's my wife? my dog? I have the kids
Suddenly the house collapses into itself
then as soon as it began, it ends
Where's my Wife? my dog.
You succumb to your fear, hold your children
so tightly, you fear they might just slip away
as the sun rises to the east, it is clouded by dust
you can now see the chaos that is ahead of you
Everything gone, the house, the car
neighbors who are alive are lost, screaming
their property gone, all of it, just like yours
Where's my Wife, Where's my dog?