Helene

Helene

Somewhere over the Atlantic,
the sky picked up the ocean,
held it high,
and together they spun.  

Somewhere under Appalachian soil,
mycelium waited for rain.

Helene twirled until she fell
in a flail of water
and a grapple of wind.

Somewhere, the tables are smashed.
There is no one
to sit in the chairs. 

Somewhere mushrooms puff
like grounded clouds,
draw fairy rings shaped
to a hurricane’s eye.  

All over the fields, mushrooms are popping up in circles, spirals, and arcs.

The grainy picture does not do it justice, but on a sundown walk yesterday evening, mushrooms were the brightest thing, like glowing constellations in the mud.

The Prompt

For many people, the name Helene conjures grief or horror—and rightly so. At last count, 64 people lost their lives and an untold number have lost their homes or livelihoods. As the crow flies, I live over 800 miles from where Helene made landfall (an unusually long distance for a crow to travel), and still the winds were savage enough to warrant school cancellations and to knock out power for hundreds of thousands of people in my state. I got lucky. The damage in my yard is limited to a few downed branches, two windows blown from an unused greenhouse, and a tree swing that now hangs high in the branches rather than low to the ground. I hope you were lucky, too, friends.

But what does it even mean to be lucky? The concept assumes that we exist apart from one another. If warm water over the Gulf of Mexico can cause mushrooms to burst in hurricane rings from the previously parched ground in Kentucky, how apart are we really? Do we have even a shadowy idea of how we impact one another? Of how we are shaped by pressure systems or political systems or the food we eat or the media we consume? Do we have any idea what sort of rings we cast in our wake?

For today’s prompt, I invite you to consider these rings. Consider the ripples that originated far from you in space or time but have still rocked your life, for better or worse. Is there someone you’ve never met who has changed your life trajectory? Is there an event that has occurred far away from you that has broken your heart wide open? Is there a pair of shoes, not your own, that you have tried to imagine walking in, and that imagining has recast your reality? How is your life influenced by the migration of ideas, the migration of birds, or by migrating storms?

Consider, too, what ripples your own life might be casting. What is migrating out from your own center and into the world? Not all of the rings we cast will be pretty or kind. We’re human, after all. I hope you’ll play with this prompt as an exercise in awareness and curiosity, rather than wielding it as a club with which to beat yourself—such beatings leave painful rings.

I hope you are dry and safe and have electricity today, friends. I hope your loved ones are wrapped in comfort and safety, as well. And I hope, too, that you can feel the underground threads that connect us all, as if we are mushrooms bursting up from the edges of the same mycelium.

I look forward to your poems and thoughts!