Storm Born
For your reading enjoyment today, I am sharing a poem from my book, "God Spelled Backwards: Rescues and Revelations." This is one of my personal favorites, because creating myth is fun.
STORM BORN
By Sharon Bebout Carr
I wake
To the boom of thunder
Driving rain
The flash of lightning…
I am encased in a quivering mass of fur.
Four dogs have scaled the heights of our lofty bed
Seeking comfort.
As long as the storm continues
I will own a vibrating bed.
The fifth sleeps on beneath us.
This fear is not his.
He has learned to trust
The shelter of our home.
Tree frogs inhabit his nightmares,
Both more mysterious and more mundane,
Their cool blood encasing them in armor
His sensitive nose is helpless to breach.
Legends speak
Of the time a bond was forged
A lasting truce between dog and humankind.
It is said the promise between us
Came from hunger and fire,
That in the murky distance of pre-history
A man (of course…women are erased by history)
sat by a fire,
Tossing the remnants of his dinner
Indiscriminately about him.
A dog, driven by hunger,
Overcame her fear of fire
And crept close
To feast on the remains of dinner,
And somehow stayed,
And communicated to others of her kind
Where a good meal was to be had.
Our melding then was that of
Stomach to stomach.
Where is the magic in that?
I offer a new legend,
Based on what I know of dogs,
That the relationship we share
Was storm born.
That as human beings (women among them)
Sat in a cave
Enjoying each other’s warmth
There came a storm
A furious tempest that uprooted trees
And called the buzz and snap of current
To leave its mark on the surrounding forest.
Propelled by crashing thunder
A pack of dogs hurtled into the cave
Not detecting, in their terror,
That it was occupied by others.
In the close confines of the cave they eyed each other
Trembling dog and crouching human.
It might have come to violence
(our history is marked with it)
Had not the storm renewed its fury.
A boom so loud it shook the very rock
Caused the crouching people to drop
Unceremoniously onto the ground
Whereupon the dogs rushed toward them.
Weaponless, the hairless animals awaited their fate
A crunch of bone
A spurt of blood
But found themselves instead
Encased in a quivering mass of fur.
Pinned to the earth,
They reached out in wonder
And were met by tongues of hope.
A bond formed, then, of mutual need
A buffer against the unknowable world
Their fears shared and halved
They rode out the storm together.
Both legends rely on elemental needs
Food for the body, shelter from the storm,
but the first lacks the give and take
the interchange of need and trust
that forges a true connection.
If hunger was all, they would have dined on us
And been done.
