She wandered in the Atlantic
like an orphan.
Tattered clothes of dusty gray,
moaning for its mother.
Her breath the sound of a forlorn child,
going toward the great marshes
of Florida.
Rag torn waif slowly growing
into a weeping maturity.
An anger at the open loneliness
of the heavens,
until half grown she burst
on the wall of the land,
lashing and heaving,
and for a moment holding up her hand,
ready to sleep on the beaches,
fall into the trees of the cities
and go forever into the haze.
Then pushed by the weight of the north,
flung back into the sea,
Katrina lifted her shutting eyes
and fire exploded in their orbs.
A monster of hail and wind
ignited in her heart,
as she blew into the Caribbean,
a great sail of limitless power.
Air turned to screaming shrieks of fury.
Katrina became a demon,
a dream,
a valkyrie released from the dungeon
of the sea, the sky,
its life rising like a volcano
on the battered ocean,
and the cities of the gulf,
hovering in the face of a certain death.
A fury unknown to the genteel
histories of their harbors.
Nature, carefully planted,
doomed to destruction,
as the waif
turned into a revengeful sorcerous.
While people prayed in beds
that would be no more,
and Katrina
crying in her paroxysm of life
and showering death,
was replaced by tears
that never seemed to stop falling.