If/When
       

The poem I planned to write
was about last week's hurricane,

about how I live in Mississippi,
not that far from the storm's rages,

and how even still we felt
nothing here, nothing at all.

That was going to be the ending,
because I wanted to make a point

about how easy it is to ignore
disaster when it's not churning

directly over your town, and I was hoping
a reader might then extrapolate

a larger point about disturbance
and proximity, like how politicians

are always saying they used to oppose X
until some terrible Y happened

to their daughters, and it seems
to me we're requiring an awful lot

from daughters these days. Sons, too.
This week a message from my kids'

school district included the phrase if/when
a lockdown is ever necessary. The reason

I'm writing this poem instead
of the one I'd planned is that I keep

thinking about that email and also
now the hurricane was a week ago

and there's a new disturbance
forming near the Bahamas. And

last night Sioux Falls was tornado-
shredded and in Sterling, Colorado,

egg-size hail pummeled windshields,
and I guess what I'm saying is, why bother

with a poem about one hurricane,
one email? There will be more,

and there will be more,
and there will be more until

there is nothing left. The thing
about the poem I was going to write

is that it would have been a lie.
That nonsense about how we don't

feel it here. We feel it everywhere,
don't we? Dear daughter, dear son,

dear someone's something, we're well
past the if and into the when.

Talk about proximity—
some days I wear the world

like a skin. I am tired of waiting
for extrapolation. Let us all

be disturbances now.

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Copyright © 2020 Catherine Pierce All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission