Poetry Friday: Earthquake Vocabulary

The temptation to post T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is almost irresistible at this time of year, and this year particularly.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Here's the rest of it.

However, I decided to post something far less worth reading, a poem I wrote myself. Since the earthquake in Haiti, I have been surprised by how often references to earthquakes come up in people's ordinary speech and in things I'm reading, including the Bible and The Trumpet of the Swan. A couple of weeks after my children and I were evacuated from Haiti I wrote this:


Earthquake Vocabulary

Here are some words I’d rather you not use metaphorically:
seismic,
Richter scale,
epicenter.

Here are some words I used before but shouldn’t have:
devastating,
catastrophe,
disaster.

Here are some words I used to know:
permanent,
stable,
solid.

Here’s a word I thought I knew but really didn’t:
earthquake.

by Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup. There's a lot of beautiful stuff today - take a look!