Dallas, Sunday night: smothering wind
at all hours often blows in these parts – but not for days at a time, full-blast, making the house crick & crack at the seams. however, the leaves are turning. wild douglas county sez this week brings the usual first freeze: not this year, sez the weather- person, not this week. a birder friend tells me the woods at chicken creek, home of ovenbird & pileated woodpecker, were flattened by the may tornado – the loss of the woods a little thing we’ll survive, but a little less. meanwhile dallas gets a tornado of its own, but fortunately they didn’t interrupt the cowboys game to issue the tornado warning. and, “considering the path the storm took, it went across a pretty densely populated part of town, we should consider ourselves fortunate we didn’t lose any lives”; several tornadoes in france, too, & s.e. of country flooding; and floods force 23 k people out of homes, villages underwater, in s.e. niger; also deadly floods in e. libya; violent inundations in n. italy ("it will make our hearts weep when we count up all the damage”); torrential gullywashers causing “bedlam” in scotland, closing stores, cancelling shows; hail wiped out the potato crop in cyprus, while hail fell in the u.a.e., & so did lots and lots of rain; & it’s still raining in tokyo; typhoon hagibis cost 70 billion yen in agriculture losses, they think. speaking of which in australia, kellogg’s raises their prices: "due to the unprecedented drought conditions, the cost of our core ingredients – like corn, wheat, oats and rice – has increased significantly . . . unfortunately we've not be able to offset all of the increased costs”; & meat prices going up 5%; all b/c worst drought in 400 yrs down yonder – & winter wheat ain’t looking good as n.s.w. runs out of water (starved flying foxes fall from the sky). but they’re winning the battle to save rich folk’s mansions from brushfires near l.a.; also getting ready for more power shutoffs: “calif. power outages could go on for a decade, top pg&e executive says” (yeah, if they’re lucky); & poor siberia: more flooding: 15 dead & 13 missing in collapsed gold mine; & turns out the tundra now emits more net CO2 than the plants absorb; and we could talk about what’s coming out of european peat bogs, or what meltwater is doing to salinity in the oceans, but that’s not my remit. we shall talk around such things – i have to go teach a class on poetry, and take in the fall beauty in case winter comes again
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |