The Eyeless Storm

Long roads with no turning
Smoke, metal and dust,
And the wind of passing cars…

…heavy weather
… a hurricane
…the eyeless storm.

The traffic’s rush spirals, a whirlwind rising;
Displaced air condenses its own black squalls;
Driven rain falls in sheets.

Dark palls of cloud above the highways;
Precipitation, wet on the tarmac,
Washes out the nearest landscape,
Hides grimy distance in the mist of wheels

Abandoned on a roadside, on the hard shoulder,
There, but for the grace of the gods of transport,
Lie stripped rubber carcasses, ruined bumpers
Cracked by impact and time, plastic litter
Jettisoned and empty, carelessly thrown away.

And a perilous climate is building:
Eddies in the air swirl with the updrafts,
Lift the stink of oil and fume, cleave it into smog.

On this long road, tunnel vision shrinks
Home and destination to road map dots,
Fogged and imaginary, lost in the haze,
In the maze of hopeless travel.

Blinded and buffeted by pressure waves,
Signs and lines and the wheels’ turning,
Steer the hands, press the feet down on pedals,
Braking into bends, changing gear, gathering speed,
Negotiating the racked ratios of time and distance.

The slipstream of cars ruffles the debris-covered verges;
Tattered posters, paper bags and the roadkill dead flutter aimlessly;
In the callous gusts a crow’s wing waves its ironic goodbye;
Blood soaked fur and feather ripple like hill grass in spring.

Everything is blurred now and will blur forever:
Vision after tears, the world seen through grief.

An anvil cloud is bearing down; its accumulated winds
Fall katabatic upon the roads again.

The passing cars throw them back,
Impatient with meteorology, whipping up the airflow.

There are no more safe havens,
No ports in the storm
Our roads are brewing.

© BH, 2017

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I was driving into town. Cars passed me and I could feel the wind of their passing. How much storm do we raise as we go motoring along these ever-increasing highways of ours?

It made me think of our mad ecology, creating our own weather to the point when the rain that falls is made by us and falls only on us. Then I remembered collateral damage and how rivers run to the sea through countries where there are no storms. Nothing, no-one is safe from the squalls we humans make. Least of all ourselves.

Ah, I thought,