I have never been in a disaster. I don't know what it is like to experience one, to survive something as life-altering as an earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami. I think those of us in America the past seven days have been living the disaster vicariously through those who survived the tsunami. We glimpse the horror through the amatuer videos or photographs. I saw one video of a wave striking the beach and one in which the wave was barreling through palm trees. You know, in that latter video, there was nothing beyond those palm trees but water, no blue sky. That's how much water came out of the sea that day.
And I saw footage from a balcony. The murky, debris-laden, and turbulent water was rushing by and a train of people were holding onto eachother and attempting to pull themselves against the maelstrom to the balcony. One by the one, the person at the end would drop off and disappear from the cameras view.
What haunts me is the screaming and shouting and terrible roar of the water, a hellish orchestra, a terrible din of pain and loss.
I've been contemplating a poem, working off of a few visuals that had stuck in my head from news reports I've read -- the man who lost his wife but thought that he had found her hand "because that looked like her hand"; a woman who had survived with a badly broken leg felt highly uncomfortable going back into civilization (some people did not know there was a disaster and others seemed to ignore her because they knew she was a survivor); and about the myriads of children that were swept away before their parents eyes, as if it were some modern day "passover" and all the first generation of the new millenium were taken from us.
I can tell you now I'll never write it.
I was reminded of a poem by W.S. Merwin this week, titled "Mirage" that seemed fitting because it seems to touch on many themes being heard by those survivors, primarily the pain of the loss, the dying hope in finding missing loved ones, the eerie fact that December 26 started out as a normal day, the guilt of not being able to hold on, to name a few.
Mirage
