Trade Winds
I understand the sound in the trees,
Why the Mokuleias are misted,
Darkening clouds twisted around
Our many-colored coral seas,
I know the colors shift as sand
Races underneath, and islands
Shrink proportional to the winds,
All of it based on the belief,
Right or wrong, that this Atlantis
Exists to trade what I think
It knows for just the surface
Of the secrets that it shows.
June 15, 2023, Kaiholu
Explanation
O’ahu is a fairly predictable paradise. Nothing disproportional ever happens, weatherwise. Even its storms are polite attempts at acceptable evening bombast with the understanding that tomorrow will dawn, as always, clear, warm, and breezy.
But Kau’ai is another story, as is the rest of the world. There, storms are apt to get out of control, building on aggregate global defects in the ocean currents, increasingly erratic trade winds, solar storms which threaten electrical grids.
Weather is increasingly serving a deranged master with no respect for friendly precedents that suggest an enjoyable, cosmetic display of lightning, as long as the intent isn’t Armageddon or Scriabin’s "Mysterium," end-of-days holocausts and pyrocenes.
The universe has been anthropocentric for thousands of years, a dependable servant of abusive human masters. But it is beginning to think about this unfair balance, and our enjoyment of the unearthly natural phenomena may pale at the lethal forces we have unleashed.