The Tornado of June 2011

photo by Katley Demetria Brown: Devastation on Hancock Street

Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. (Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz)

One of the scariest events in nature is the tornado. They seem to pop up out of nowhere, usually during a round of thunderstorms. When a cold front meets a warm front, violent weather ensues and sometimes results in tornadoes. They are prevalent in the Midwest and Southern United States.

They have always been the bane of spring in the Midwest and some parts of the Southeastern United States. My mom had the misfortune to experience the 1998 F4 tornado in Central Florida. She said it was an experience she would never forget.  Fortunately she escaped it unscathed, with minor damage to her house.

Unlike blizzards and hurricanes,  when you get some warning and can take action before the event (board up your windows, pick up a generator, batteries, and flashlights) tornadoes attack suddenly and destroy everything in their path.

Tornadoes were practically unknown in my area until one hit Springfield on June, 1, 2011. That day was hot and humid with severe thunderstorm warnings forecast.  The storms in my area began at about 4 p.m,  and shortly after, a tornado formed in Westfield, Massachusetts.  It made its way east to West Springfield, Springfield, Wilbraham, Palmer and Monson.  It ended somewhere east of  Sturbridge. The tornado was barely a mile and a half north from my house, so it was visible from the back yard, according to one of the neighbors.

(I never got a chance to take a photo of it because my daughter told me to get my ass in the basement...now!) Fortunately, someone with a camera captured the moment.

photo from Wikipedia Commons: "Tornado in Springfield"

I watched the devastation on TV and couldn't believe what I saw. Three people died and 500 became homeless.

The Springfield tornado was one of the worst natural disasters I had witnessed. Although I was fortunate enough to escape it unscathed (no damage to my house or property, no one in my family was injured), barely two miles from me there was devastation everywhere in the form of downed trees, damaged homes, and downed power lines. I remember driving home from work and being rerouted (because of downed trees) into the area affected by the tornado.  It looked like a war zone.  Rubble was everywhere, and people in a total daze gathered as many household goods as they could salvage,and loaded them into cars and vans. The Mass Mutual Center became an emergency shelter.

My neighborhood escaped the damage and we even had electricity.  One of my friends was not so fortunate and had downed trees in her yard.  She and another friend had no electricity for a week.  The elementary school that my children attended years ago took a direct hit.  This photo is of one of the apartment buildings right next to the school, a few days later.

Apartment Building on Hancock Street, by Katley Demetria Brown

The school has now been housed in mobile classrooms and a new building will be built in a another location in the near future.

Most of the damaged areas have been rebuilt, however, nearly three years later, you can see evidence of tornado damage in parts of town.

I wrote a poem about it shortly afterwards. You may or may not believe in a Supreme Being, but to me God is someone who creates and destroys.

Coming at You From a Pissed-off God

Nature is random

If there is a God

he gets bored sometimes and

natural disasters are his playthings.

Fire, flood, tornado and hurricane

are some of the weapons in his arsenal.

ready to be unleashed on unsuspecting people

when they least expect it.

June first was one of those days.

That afternoon God took out his camera

to take flash pictures of Springfield.

He was in one of his cantankerous moods

and decided to turn on the fan

but he got a little more than what he bargained for

when he turned the switch to “high.”.

The funnel cloud he created was

more than just a breeze and it danced

across the landscape toppling bricks and buildings

and hundred year old trees.

Roofs were torn off houses

from the force of the wind.

Debris flew down the streets and rain

drenched the land.

A city mourned its loss of innocence.

You never know when your time is up

It depends what kind of mood God is in that day.

Just don’t piss him off.

By the way, I have another blog, updated weekly, about music and dance from the Balkans, The Alien Diaries. I guarantee you'll enjoy it!

Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. All Rights Reserved. Photos and poetry © Katley Demetria Brown (with the exception of the photo from Wikipedia Commons.)

Mother's Day, A Female Activist's Blog, and Feminist Poetry

• 

Tulips, May 2014 

Don't forget to pick up a bottle of wine for your Mom for Mother's Day. After all, you're one of the reasons she drinks.
anonymous

May is one of the most beautiful months of the year as long as the sun shines.

Although we're in the middle of spring, it has been rather chilly.

I think that's why the Mother's Day falls on the second Sunday of May. Whoever chose the time of year for Mother's Day picked a perfect time of year.  The trees are in bloom, and there are flowers everywhere.  Retailers and online florists go crazy because they know there is serious money to be made selling flowers for people to give to Mom on her special day.  As for me, I prefer chocolate and a meal at an ethnic restaurant, the more exotic, the better.

The problem with Mother's Day is this holiday discriminates against women who aren't mothers.  I don't mind it when my children bring me gifts or take me out to lunch.  I think Mother's Day is unfair, however, for women who chose not to have children and women who are unable to have children due to infertility. The role of mother is not the only game in town  nowadays when women can do so much more with their lives than they were able to in the last century.

I prefer, instead, to celebrate International Women's Day on March 8th.  (You can read about it on my other blog, The Alien Diaries). It is a day which honors all women. There is also International Men's Day in November (equal opportunity, you know) in November, although many people have not heard of it.  These holidays are not observed in the States because Women's Day, especially is seen as a Communist plot. After, all, International Women's Day was  a Russian idea, and the Russians have been getting a lot of bad press lately for the situation in Ukraine.

I don't understand why anyone would see a holiday for women as a bad thing. Only women can be mothers, but not all women want to be mothers. So why not celebrate all women?

A young female blogger made a big impression on me by speaking out against injustice, especially against women. The Republican Party here in the States would have women barefoot and pregnant if they had their way,

The young woman, whose name  Madison Kimrey  is an atheist and lives in the Bible Belt.  I imagine she gets a lot of flak from the Bible Thumpers where she lives. I give her a lot of credit for standing up against injustice, whether it is discrimination against the female gender, or the fact that she notices the United States is turning into a theocracy.  It's the Christian Right who are behind this. They feel that the United States is a Christian nation.  This notion makes me very uncomfortable, since this country was founded upon separation of church and state.

Fundamentalist religion subjugates women, and makes them second class citizens. There is a jihad going on in this country, and it's not coming from Islamic terrorists, but from Fundamentalist Christians and Tea Party Republicans who try to force their fanatical brand of religion on the rest of us.  I ain't buying.

Speaking of religion, I have had some bad experiences that I was a little girl in Catholic school.  Back in the old days, the Catholic schools were run by nuns who had no problem hitting young children with ruler and pointers.  It was seen as discipline, you know the Bible aphorism "spare the rod and spoil the child." The punishment they doled out on these kids would be seen as child abuse nowadays. The nuns couldn't deal with the likes of me and kicked me out of school, so I attended public school, which I liked much better.

To this day, I avoid religion which is something that I see as crowd and mind control, although I respect the right of people to worship as they see fit. Just don't try to convert me.

Even though I'm a mother and a grandmother, I raised my girls to be strong women, and taught them to question everything. I'm glad they are following in my footsteps.

It's time to get off the soapbox since I've been standing on it too long.

Several years ago I wrote a poem based (loosely) on Heine's Lorelei.  Heine was a German poet who also happened to be Jewish.  He was persona non grata in Hitler's Germany, (even though he was dead a long time by then) and his books were burned, along with other works authored by those repugnant to the Nazi Party.  Heine, too, would have been burned had he been around during the Nazi era.  This is the kind of thing that happens when discrimination turns into downright hatred, and Hitler and his cronies had a passionate hatred of Jewish people.

Fortunately, the Nazis and their followers did not take over the world, and they lost the war.

Many years ago I had the good fortune to live in Germany, not far from the Lorelei. My husband and I often visited St. Goar, a tourist trap type town on the Rhine, across the river from that infamous rock.  German legend had it that a siren lived on top of the rock and sang to lure the sailors and the bargemen, and led them towards disaster.

This barge, which had just passed the Lorelei, got through the gorge in one piece. If it had crashed it would have meant death by hypothermia (or worse) for those aboard.

Rheingau by St. Goar, in February

Since I've saved the best for last, here's my poem Siren's Song. It's an excerpt from my chapbook The Visionary, and you can also find it in the anthology The Art of Being Human, Volume 7: Sagittarius2-Love Poems. . Also, please pardon the crazy formatting.  Microsoft Word gets lost in translation on Blogger.

I knew you from

another lifetime

and I'm sure I saw you once

in this one.

You were in a dream of mine

and years later I saw you

a young man

standing across the river.

You gazed at me with longing,

your eyes filled me with desire.

Although I never met you

you were so close and yet so far.

 I never forgot

the siren song of your smile

and the beauty of your eyes

for that brief moment.

I search for you everywhere.

You are always on my mind

yet I don't even know who you are.

But if I ever met you I'd be tempted

to leave my husband

and crash on the rocks

to repeat history

this time around.

Something in my soul told me

you had once loved me

and the affair had ended sadly.

Would I sell my soul

for a second chance?

Yes.

Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. Poetry and artwork on this site may not be reproduced or copied without permission of the author.