Hello. I couldn’t get this tornado memory to copy on the pdf file, so I am emailing it.  thanks

TOTO FLEW

Coming around—-from long ago
and far away—-to Kansas,
I hadn’t remembered this year
was an anniversary:
forty summers of time and breath,
and several continents
and states of mind
have marked my line of life
since then. And there:
June 8, 1966:

I am nineteen, almost,
swinging off the dusty bus,
clomping the last mile home
from a day camp job:
down the gravel path,
  across the creek,
    loping through the suburbs
  in slow waning heat.
The summer is young,
but odd—-hot, then clammy cold.
The weather stews and sulks.

Hungry and restless, I dodge Mom,
and haunt the kitchen, then wander
outside like a cloud. The sky,
like old meat, is turning green,
and smells of sweat and ozone.
Or is it I? I feel quite like the sky.

No wind, no bird; leaves and laundry
hang like hung men.
Something in a rhythm turns;
the ground shivers, grass flattens,
children and dogs turn tail
and run for cover. Or Mother.

Then the sky heaves, moans,
shrieks like the passion of birth,
and a white hell whirls and falls—-
half a mile wide!—-
on the Indian mound
just south of our house.
Not yet soiled with death,
the dragon lands, devouring
all within it’s insatiable path.

From the house, Mom screams
my name as I race with the wind,
and climb the fence, to stand
and BE as long as I can.
Dirt and debris slice the air
like demons.
I face the holy mound and holler,
arms open, my heart a twist
of fear and foolish daring.
Then I’m hit by some Thing,
tumbled from my post;
I crouch and crawl across the road
to our door that hangs and slams.

In the basement, my brother
hides his bones
beneath a wicker basket
and utters weird prayers;
kid sister squeezes the throat
of our cross-eyed cat,
a closer sister and I
stare each other in the eye.
Mother screams goodbye.

Silence:

We don’t die.
Our bruised house stands.
One by one,
like stunned ghosts freed,
we creep outside
into a deaf and riddled world:

The air snaps, cables writhe,
paper and clothing sift
from heaven like shredded angels.
All is down—-a scimitar swath
seventeen miles through and out
Topeka’s wounded side.
Bludgeoned, shorn, raped and plundered,
our town cries. I hear her.
Through blackened rain,
a dazed lamb, blind and red,
wobbles down the street,
blown from who knows where.
We who surface, who survive,
walk, wet and dumb,
through a blown-out world,
looking for neighbors—-,
with, or without their beings—-
and the sun goes down,
  down,
    down;
and the moon? Lord knows.

Forty years ago, and it still plays
in my mind like a black and white
home movie, all spotted and jerky
and terribly real. For awhile longer
I stayed in Kansas, then strayed,
then left for decades.
Now I circle back, to Topeka:
trees once again muscled and mature,
stand in ranks like guardians;
homes spread among their shade
like wise old women.
Coming home to Kansas…
to live, I suppose. To die?
I wonder. Stranger things
have happened in my life
that feels quite like the sky.

Thank you for sharing this poem about the tornado. We have added it to our tornado remembrances collection in the Topeka Room!