HURRICANE STORY, 1903


    1

  1. Time and time again, Grandmother plucked
  2. bits of fowl coop from the pinguin fence.
  3. Grandfather drained his fields, shored up
  4. their lives against improvidence.
  5. When the earth baked hard again, into
  6. the forest he walked to cut the thatch
  7. to patch his house. Corn drying in the husk
  8. he hung from the rafters while afu yam
  9. and sweet potato ripened (safe from
  10. breeze-blow) underground.

  11. 2

  12. When the wind rose in '03, he opened his
  13. tin trunk, took his good clothes out
  14. and packed the corn in. Granny topped it
  15. with cassava bammies and chaklata balls
  16. with a nutmeg and cinnamon leaf tied
  17. with string. After the storm, Granny
  18. would extract milk from fallen coconuts,
  19. make coconut oil to fry the bammies, grate
  20. corn to make porridge, melt the chocolate
  21. in hot milk with cinnamon and nutmeg
  22. to give us courage.

  23. 3

  24. In those days storm warning came by
  25. telegraph to Postmistress. Living in
  26. the bush, Grandfather couldn't see her
  27. rush to broadcast the news by posting
  28. a black flag. But he was the seventh son
  29. of a seventh son and could read signs
  30. and interpret wonders so when the swallows
  31. flew below the roof line, when the sky
  32. took on a special peach glow, when flocks
  33. of birds sailed west over the hill,
  34. when clouds banked at the far side and the air
  35. was still, he knew it was time to batten down.
  36. Into the house Granny brought her goat
  37. and fowls – though in the excitement,
  38. two birds fled.

  39. 4

  40. Grandfather knew just when to board
  41. the last window up and brace the door.
  42. Noah's ark was never as crowded and wet.
  43. Thatch blew about and whipped our faces,
  44. water seeped in, but on Grandfather's bed
  45. we rode above it, everything holding
  46. together. For my grandfather had learnt
  47. from his father and his father before him
  48. all the ways of orchestrating disaster.
  49. And my grandmother schooled on Sankeys
  50. led us in singing. In our frail bark
  51. in total darkness we passed through the eye
  52. and out the other side, till all was still.
  53. When Grandfather opened the window the sun
  54. was shining.

  55. Granny hitched up her skirt and petticoats
  56. to unseemly heights (we children had never
  57. seen so much skin). Stood waist deep
  58. in the water in her yard and searched
  59. the blue skies for a sign as Noah's wife did.
  60. She found it when her missing sensay fowl
  61. and favourite leghorn rooster turned up safe
  62. but ruffled, having spent the night together
  63. in the hole in the Cotton Tree.

  64. And as we put our lives back together
  65. I too young to be schooled yet on disaster
  66. spent my time watching that sensay fowl that
  67. strutting leghorn rooster, dying to be
  68. the first to see the strange bird fated
  69. to be born out of that great storm.