Anniversary

Last week it slipped by unobserved.
Oh, not a wedding or a birth –
the weather had closed my mind,
and this probably wasn’t worth
a pause: there was little to remind
one of it, and even less that it deserved.

Two years ago it marked a typhoon’s edge.
At its rim I stood callow-faced, and paying
obeisance to a mistress out to woo. The winds
were held in check, the smiling calm betraying
no artifice, nor whiff of later violence,
with neither portent nor a presage.

But soon it blew, and its malignant force
left entire histories changed, and charts
as futile parchment – things to grace a wall,
or gift someone unlettered in the arts
of fickle seas. And all hopes of a landfall
gone with reason, blown hopelessly off course.

***