Hurricane Katrina. What can be said that isn’t woefully inadequate? The death and destruction is mind-boggling, and for it to happen in America is a painful reminder of the frailty of our illusions of invulnerability. So much pain and suffering. How can you respond to something like that? How could you comprehend its enormity and not be driven mad by compassion?

When I’m struggling with something in my mind and in my heart, I find expressing it in writing, often in poetry, helps me deal with all the confusion in my head. So in memory of those who died in Hurricane Katrina, and those who died in the aftermath through human inability, incompetence or evil:

I of the Storm

O watch the running people
Flee the running waters
my mighty rain has raised.

Watch their matchstick towers
Their crumbling, feeble walls
What destruction I have brought!

Darkest nature exposed
Not in the raging storm
But in the rioting mobs

You call me by Katrina
though I have no name or mind;
You, humans, though,
have thought
and mind
and heart
The darkest storms of nature
rage in human hearts.

by Caleb Woodbridge