Watching Irene approach DC, it suddenly dawned on me that my first published poem was written while living in DC in the wake of Hurricane Isabel, the poem about hurricanes and PTSD. Let me explain:
Setting the scene:
My first daughter had just been born in a hospital in suburban Maryland as Hurricane Isabel's bands approached the metro area. Soon after her birth, just as we were preparing to drive home in the storm's outer rain bands, the hospital lost power.
I was still suffering from diagnosed PTSD symptoms after our return from Israel. It had only been a year since the terrorist attack that almost took my wife. And so there I was, with a newborn baby, and a hurricane. And I was freaking out.
I knew it. The shortness of breath. The shaking. The panic. The thoughts, "Am I going to kill us all on the way home" more than just passing notions. They were debilitating cognitive obsessions.
When we got home to our 600 square-foot apartment in Mount Pleasant, and after my wife had gone to bed with our newborn, I stayed up and wrote what you see below.
It was published in Pebble Lake Review in 2005 – my first ever poetry publication.
I don't like to explain poems. Just knowing that it involves my psychological state post-terror attack and the hurricane as metaphor should be enough.
Peace.
On Being Anchored
What they don’t tell you is that hurricanes, like lightening, can strike exactly the same spot time and again.
– Philip Gerard, “What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes”
I have been thinking about my moorings,
a taut collection of fraying twine
being worked, the relentless rising
and falling of a tide roused
by the hurricane building
in the gulf of my hull,
protecting and pulling me under, at once,
a schooner bound to the dock
so as not to be wrestled away
by wind and waves,
destined for the bashing against weathered planks
when the cyclone hits lands.
Feeling the sinuous ropes wrapping
around my bow, the rigging
wringing my mast, my center,
I bob in a murky mess
of blistered memories moving neither
forward nor aft,
waiting against the wharf
for the blood-tinged squalls to come,
the storms tracking toward
my dark hold preparing to punish
with wind-whipped remembrances of ripped skin
and burnt flesh, of speaking Hebrew in hospitals
after a bomb spewing bolts battered
her delicate body.
Efshar l’kabel truffot?
Could we get some pain medication?
Eifo rofeh ha’kveeyah?
Where is the burn specialist already?
Rather than remain tied to this pier
stacked with cracked containers leaking
used IV lines, rolls of red-soaked gauze,
bed pans folded into flowered linens
emitting ammonium smells,
monitoring machines electronically
beeping, beeping, beeping...
what I should do is unwind the bitter end
gripping the bitt set upon my deck
holding me in the tempest’s track
and be taken by the currents
tugging at my keel, trying to
pull me leeward, away.