RESPITE REALITY

*The French Broad, Asheville, 30 foot high and rising raging

I close my eyes

Gently

To sleep

And voila!

A beautiful array of bare Treescape

Appears vividly

Behind my lids to keep*

Gradually the the trees begin to sway

And fall this way

and that

I notice water in the landscape

Rising, rising,

The banks broadly wet

The river becomes a lake

The water keeps rising

The torrent engulfs all

Clearing my beautiful silhouetted trees

Sacrificing them to Storm

The river now raging

60 feet high!!!

Consuming everything nigh

The serene landscape dream

I began  has become reality

In its place raged the perfect storm

Stop dream

Stop this nonsense!

Quickly opening my eyes

In a frightful fit

It was not a dream

But the actual event

Intensely burnt

Upon my eyelids

By Helena*

Had I been transported

While in my lazy-lid landscape

Had dream overcome me?

Or was it actually some disastrous event

Punctuated by raging rivers

Toxicity

And deadly mudslide

Misfortunes

Shutting my eyes

Bam!

The landscape was gone

My eyelid slate

Wiped clean

And everything else

Too

Also Gone

Gone to the perfect storm

What do you do when you have lost everything? EVERYTHING!

*Some might call eyelid projection “the mind’s eye,” I prefer the former because you can’t unsee the terribleness of the disaster.

tom tenbrunsel

Poet Laureate of  Helena

Author’s Notes: Lets have another go at this poem. Let me teach you, if you will, how to decipher it. How to uncover its meaning in the lines and stanza and in between the lines and cross stanzas. A poem holds much treasure until discovered.

So let’s start by rereading. Read it again a bit more slowly, refining the staccato of words. Then once more with gusto and bravado.

“A beautiful array of bare Treescape

Appears vividly

Behind my lids to keep”

Letting your mind comprehend hidden theme, meaning, shape and sound. Feel free to unwrap the scenes encapsulated with your imagination. I’ve written it. Now you must internalize it. It’s your content to work with now.

“Toxicity” picture the contents of your garage, the gas’s station down the street and the chemical plant all being totally washed away into the river. Picture when the river resides, the toxins remaining in the silty soil it leaves behind. Imagine the farmers’ topsoil being sweep away by a raging waters. What now?

I closed my eyelids just now and saw articles, posters, storm driven upheaval and toxic pneumonia.

Take possession. Make it yours. The transition from “dream evolving into reality,” enhances your images from your memory bank, to unlock and repaint and understand the poet’s poem. The poem relies on your recall to complete the word movie proposed by the poet. Such allows the poem to become inexplicably tied in your mind’s soul. Therein is where the true understanding takes place. The poetic experience is now yours. Now reread Respite using the shape of the poem. Shape is like a musical score. Let shape guide your recitation. Read the shape, line by line. Discover the rhythm of shape. Recite it and see the poetic symphony unfold. That’s it. Let the shape and position guide you to unlock meaning. Become one with the poem. As you reread the poem, pay particular attention to its shape.  Shape is intentional, and as so is important in freestyle poetry. There is rhyme, inter line rhyme, inter stanza rhyme.

Then too when there is no rhyme at times, rhythm and form take over. In RESPITE, the title does not reappear in the poem. Is there respite? Or is it reality? Which? Find it in your imagination by deciphering the technique, the shape, sounds images.

The reader must unlock the poem. The reader of poetry is not just a passive bystander. You must redeem the poem. Without a reader a poem does not exist. Poems because of their nature require the reader to participate, to close the circle. You are the The Maestro bringing meaning to otherwise stark awkward shape, making the poem flow with rhyme and new reason. For without the audience, what was Amadeus.

Now Helena a half year later - an addendum to the tour of an impossible dream into virtual nightmare. I have been to storm torn Swannanoa, North Carolina bringing supplies to the storm victims. Having lost everything. Hear me well and picture this in your soul’s eye, EVERYTHING! If they had a house to return to, they would. If they had their clothes and wallet, they couldn’t buy anything because store was taken by the raging river. If their car wasn’t mangled in tree/trash piles left twenty feet high, stretching two hundred feet long along river banks and under hundreds of mudslides, they couldn’t buy gas for it anyway. And the worst of the disaster was what and who else were in those debris piles as helicopters geomarked buzzards for ground recovery teams and cadaver dogs searched (some dogs got sick and died searching the toxic waste).

The lesson learned from the disastrous fluke of Nature, was the neighbor helped neighbor. Neighbors from every state. Canada and other countries pitched in to clear and rebuild and infuse the essentials, supplies and food, water, shelter (for now they are living in temporary little houses and RVs and the like).The Corps of Engineers were dispatched in the following February in force. Picture dozens and dozens of huge cranes lined up in the riverbeds, crane-wading the middle of once again calm streams, raising their giant dinosaur-like heads clearing and re-contouring riverbanks, loading massive trucks with debris on Corps reconstructed roads and rebuilt bridges.

All is not rebuilt in Whoville. But surprising,Western North Carolina nestled among these ancient Appalachians is resiliently, tenaciously rebuilding and amazingly open for business. Much debris has been removed. There are shops and stores and hotels and restaurants and art and music in full swing. There are 55 breweries open for business!!!  So y’all come ya here!

Hekena may never be over but long remembered. God bless and heal and watch over the brave soul survivors of Helena and have mercy on those lost forever in the wind and waters and mudslides. 🙏🏻