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

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

    22. 3

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

    37. 4

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

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

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