Tsunami Poem

Another poem I wrote that's part of an "Earth Changes" series:

Tsunami

Some hoped it would stay locked in time,
like Hokusai’s “Great Wave,” its balance
“most beautiful, just before” its collapse.

This isn’t high-cresting art, but rather about reach,
which starts by scraping clean with watery knife,
exposing unseen shore,

Sucking sounds of hands on clay,
that push and prod fingers wet
with oceanic slip miles into land,

Grabbing what’s grown, built, born,
welded, nailed, poured,
prepared and painted,

To carry back to sea,
that roiling volcanic kiln
from where it all arose.

~ Cynthia Gallaher ◦

Tsunami Poem

Crossing Portages

A poem I wrote that expresses a theory of what might transpire in conjunction with the NMSZ:

Crossing Portages

Eagles soar over their namesake marsh only once a year,
in the state marketed as “a great place to sleep!”
to those on cross-country road trips.

When they roost, eagle eyes might connect dots
that draw carp fingerlings between raindrops,
across flooded portages to meander toward Erie.

Before long, their massive filets could back-flip over Niagara,
like divers who catapult from Acapulco cliffs
with all their strength.

Here in the lolling headwaters, it’s awfully quiet in Lime City,
where the old canal that carved its artifice next to the real
waits smothered under buildings and concrete roadways.

When I put my ear to the ground
close to the banks of the Little River,
I’m not sure if I hear

the splash of thousands of fins on approach,
or these rivers, angry, twice invaded,
scheming to split what George Washington sought,

right down the middle.

~ Cynthia Gallaher ◦

Crossing Portages