Poetry: What the flood washed away (and what it couldn’t)

Poem for the one year anniversary of Hurricane Helene:

What the water washed away (and what it couldn’t)

“It even has a

cute little creek!”

I told my mom,

hardly believing that this

slice of the world

would soon be ours

to love and care for.

And love and care

we did, fruit trees

and gardens,

chickens and

sheep, laughter

and splashes and

sunsets.

So it was hard to

believe that cute

little creeks could

create cuts and

caverns into the

land…could carry

fruit trees and gardens,

drown chickens and

sheep, silence laughter

and leave us with just

the sunset and stifling

air.

Cut off from the world by

invisible signals and

physical tree limbs,

our limbs trembled in fear,

threatening to crack too as

we whispered in the pitch black,

“Do you think…?”

One year, one

thousand reasons to

be grateful. For

friends near and far,

for grit,

for grace.

This poem could

weave like the new

paths of the river,

digging into details

and dates like a

devastating diary

that gets thrown into

the water in the final

scene.

If that’s a movie,

this is a TikTok and

the word for this

highlight reel is:

change.

Now my six year

old keeps a go bag

“just in case” of

evacuation

and

Emergency alerts

feel like a physical

attack, my

nervous system afraid

as if I were squaring

up to a bear.

The real bears,

also a threat,

drop their children

each night since the

hurricane on my

back porch while

I make my own

swear to stay

inside after sunset.

The cat, unfazed

by the mothers inside

and out simply watches.

She has seen the landscape

change and the

people and animals

come in and out

from angles I can’t imagine.

Change, change, change

whisper the trees left to

usher us into this next chapter.

It’s okay to grieve or to feel

indifferent or to look forward or

to be angry or afraid

or to rest (or to rest!)

or to

or to

I for one, am just glad

to be doing it all with you.

See the water washed away

[holding space for your grief here], but

nothing could come close to crushing

our acts of community.

Not

even

a

thousand

year

flood.

With love and admiration!

-Runda Alamour, Swannanoa Resident