Whither This Damnable Weather?

This is the poesy of our discontent.

What hath wrought this calamitous insinuation,
this blasphemous invocation,
this intervention of peril to our mundane existence?
Some divinity long forgot, shaken from slumber,
angered by the awakening?
A supernatural spirit force,
thunderously cascading like a meteor
from a black hole hidden beyond the most luminous of stars?
Might it be a vexing inner lack of tolerance,
centuries of ignorance loosened from its shackles,
a miasma of misunderstanding, vanity’s stepchild,
shaken from its grounding, escaped from secret repose,
to prey upon the witting heirs of its ancient regime?
Have we, the wretched and regal in tandem,
inherited a heretofore hidden betrayal?
Or might we merely be the innocent benefactors
of this woeful catastrophic coincidence,
the inelegant devastations that plague this season?

As purple prose goes, it’s not Shakespeare, but it’s not bad if I do say so myself.

As my own personal favorite bard would ask of one Mr. Jones, using verbiage far less florid, “You know something’s happening but you don’t know what it is, do you?”

Far from being one of those fanatical religious doomsayers, I still must ask: Have we pissed off the Big Kahuna or what? Are the Bible-thumping zealots on to something for once? Have our Sodom and Gomorrahesque ways finally provoked you-know-who into teaching us a serious lesson? Is the desecration of New Orleans, home of laissez les bon temps roulez, more than mere natural happenstance?

Was it actually some fundamentalist get-right-with-God signpost?

Or are we paying for centuries of treating mothership earth like a mud room rug? We have plundered the land, cutting down forests, polluting waterways and indiscriminately changing their natural meandering. We have looted her bounty, swallowed her nutrition without replenishment.

Hurricanes. Death. Destruction. Insensitive governance. Those four horsemen of contemporary apocalypse are just the beginning of our travail.

Our routines have been shattered. Autumn, the season of gathering, of returning to hearth, has dawned despotic. Our nation is adrift, out of sorts, shell-shocked by nature’s wrath, in need of succor from national leaders who provide begrudging lip service.

Stuff happens. Nature rules.

Why now such sturm und drang?

I’m asking a lot of questions here. The reason is simple. I haven’t a clue what the answers might be.

Katrina and Rita, point and exclamation point, are names we won’t easily forget. Sisters in arms, they are. A lethal dose is what they bestowed as parting gift.

George Walker Bush is a name that, as one of his more eloquent predecessors poeticized, shall go down in infamy. He is the Wizard of Oz, all blustery rhetoric, proven beyond peradventure to be devoid of substance. More disturbing if not surprising, he lacks humanity. Accountably so, he is his brazenly insensitive mother’s son.

Yet I digress. This was to be simply a contemplation of our discontent.

These are the queries our legion must face.
Whither this disconsolate plight,
this abominable dishevelment?
What deities are they that reason we have abandoned fealty?
Embittered by our neglect of that which they created,
they have unsheathed their swords,
flourishing them with madding result.
Convince them now we must
that theirs is a lesson learned;
our imperative understood,
beseech them to counsel us the way of healing.

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