“Tornado,” by Robert Hedin
In honor of National Poetry Month and of the upcoming five-year anniversary of the tornado that hit Iowa City, I offer up “Tornado” by Robert Hedin.
Tornado over Lebanon, Kansas, 1902. Image from the Library of Congress.
Tornado
Four farms over it looked like a braid of black hemp
I could pull and make the whole sky ring.
And I remember there falling to earth that night
The broken slats of a barn, baling wire, straw and hay,
And one black leather Bible with a broken spine.
I think of the bulls my father slaughtered every August,
How he would pull out of that rank sea
A pair of collapsed lungs, stomach,
Eight bushels of gleaming rope he called intestines,
And one bucket of parts he could never name.
In the dream that keeps coming back in the shape
Of a barn, my father has just drained
His last bull. Outside it is raining harder
Than I’ve ever seen, and the sky is about to step down
On one leg. And all through the barn,
As high as the loft, the smell of blood and hay.
All night, as long as the dream holds,
He keeps turning the thick slab of soap over and over,
Building the lather up like clouds in his hands.
It is one of at least two tornado poems that Hedin has published. The other is of a pig taking flight, and it’s not as whimsical as it seems at first glance.
