Surviving the storm Oct. 31, 2012
Leave it to her to use a super storm as a metaphor for her life, two weeks after her resignation putting it all in perspective.
She managed to somehow post the poem prior to the massive loss
of power that our whole part of the world suffered, while we moved out of our
offices to take refuge in the maternity ward of a local hospital which still
had power, and more importantly, access to the internet, where I got view this
short but potent treaty on her current condition.
Reading this a year later, out of context with the storm, I
might have assumed that it reflected some new major personal catastrophe, and
might have painted it as a negative poem, when the opposite is true.
The poem, instead, reflects the turmoil she had already gone
through, and uses the advance of the storm as a metaphor for what has already
transpired, and ultimately, the poem reflects a strangely positive outlook.
The super storm in reality took its time to manifest itself so
when it finally arrived, it was a calamity, perhaps reflected in her opening which
as a “calm, snapped like a thousand limbs,” and the high wings that turn
everything inside out, revealing to the world things that might have previously
been hidden.
This may well reflect her conversation with the Little Man
and how her life got turned upside down, shattered, and what had been private
suddenly exposed and made public.
This personal storm seems to have overwhelmed her, shaking
her out of a calm, tearing up the foundations of what she spent a year
constructing, exposing things to public scrutiny, things she had tried to keep
private.
Her world has been turned upside down, and she is struggling
to put the pieces back together from the “thousand snapped limbs,” her secrets
exposed, even though in truth, she has been protected from serious scrutiny by the
Little Man and others, who apparently have minimized the damage by allowing her
to “do the right thing.”
Yet at this point in time, she sees herself as vulnerable,
like a hermit crab that has been cast out from one shell and is scrambling desperately
to find another.
She sees the devastation, the wrecked plans, the ruined
relationships she had spent a year investing in, and as with most that survive
natural disaster she is looking around, trying to figure out where to start rebuilding,
and no doubt, wondering who she can trust to help her.
The whole thing goes beyond the poem in some ways as her
personal disaster coincides with a national disaster in a series of mounting
calamities, and she has to be sitting there in the window of her apartment
looking out at the landscape wondering what else could possibly go wrong.
But the poem, as I said earlier, is not negative, and the storm
that had created such havoc in her personal life has also swept away all of the
junk, the bad baggage that has weighed her down, giving her an opportunity to
start all over from scratch.
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