Concrete Poem
No one’s told me how lonely it is up here.
The sun is gone.
It’s time to run wild.
The sky won’t stop crying today.
For the first time, I see the quiet sky crying happy tears.
Brother, I don’t know happiness well, but let’s just cry.
Thunder is shining on the dark night
Til the sun comes again,
Please stay here a little longer.
Hold each other’s hands and smile.
As we go, we leave everything behind.
The poem is about Hurricane Laura that happened in southwest Louisiana from the wind’s point of view. The wind is high in the sky and lonely. From the wind’s perspective, rain and thunderstorms are its friends. They hardly see each other. Therefore, once they gather, they get more intense and behave in a very excited uncontrolled way. I chose to draft the poem into a shape of a tornado because it helps add to the meaning of the original poem. The word “cry” not only represents the happy tears as friends reconnect, but also symbolizes the damage they cause as the tornado sweeps through. The last three lines in the concrete poem illustrate the ground. Spacing between words are inconsistent because I want to depict a picture where houses are destroyed, roofs get pulled off, trees are uplifted, vehicles are hurled hundreds of yards — things are not the way they used to be.
