Monday, February 25, 2008

Weather Emporium

[This week's prompt at Read Write Poem was to write about weather. See what the other folks came up with here. I wrote this just today and I need to tweak it a bit. I realized that it may not be obvious that I moved away from where I grew up.]



Weather Emporium

We imported our weather from
Colorado, when I was a girl,
watching it head straight for us
across the prairie, determined
to be ours in a day or two.

Now my weather is more
cosmopolitan. Mexico's
Gulf sends rivers of moisture.
Canada drops icy wind on us.
Africa's coast twists together
wild, wet, windy
disasters to unwrap.

And occasionally
we get domestic weather from
Colorado, albeit altered
on its longer trek
across the continent.






21 comments:

Linda said...

Excellent metaphor here! I read it first just thinking about weather, then read your intro and went back to read it again and the poem meant so much more!

Joyce Ellen Davis said...

Loved the way you moved from the simple to the complex, and then brought back a little coda of simple.

paisley said...

with out having noticed it on my own.. this makes all that much sense to me... very nicely crafted too.....

sister AE said...

Hi, Linda. I'm glad you like it.

Hello, pepektheassassin, and thanks.

Thanks, paisley.

Crafty Green Poet said...

clever poem, I enjoyed reading it

sister AE said...

Hi, Juliet. Thanks!

anthonynorth said...

A clever take.

sister AE said...

Thanks, anthony.

Anonymous said...

i love thinking about where weather comes from. ... now think about whose weather you could import if you had a choice!

sister AE said...

Oh! But, Carolee, there are so many, many to choose from! And now you have me thinking again.

rbarenblat said...

I love these first two lines!

sister AE said...

Thanks, Rachel.

Anonymous said...

Very well done. But then your poems are that way. Thanks!

coiled and cocooned

Anonymous said...

Very clever poem. I really like how you induce geography and place throughout the work. I picked up on your change of location very easily. Thanks for stopping by my blog and leaving a comment.

Anonymous said...

Nice! I love these lines the most-

Africa's coast twists together
wild, wet, windy
disasters to unwrap.

Very clever how you bring together many locations and types of weather, and make it all flow so smoothly in your poem.

sister AE said...

Thanks, Gautami! How nice of you to say that. I try to put only the better ones online - I have written plenty of dreck, but it is piled up in a virutal re-write stack, hoping for future attention.

Hello, Pam. It was a pleasure to visit. I'll be back. I'm glad you got the geography but I've stopped assuming that Americans know how this place fits together, and I certainly don't make that assumption for those in other parts of the world. I guess it depends on my audience...

sister AE said...

Thanks, Christine. Hurricanes make such a big impact (no pun intended) when they do hit, but the word hurricane didn't carry the interest that I wanted. I'm glad you like what I came up with there.

Maria said...

I loved the simplicity of this poem and then after reading it twice over, decided that I loved the complexity of it even more....

sister AE said...

Thanks, Maria!

Anonymous said...

Noticing the direction from which the weather comes is one of the first things I really take note of when staying in a new place for a while. This was so real to me - great job!

sister AE said...

Thanks, BD.