Reading this, I felt like I was riding out the poem, just like one would ride out a hurricane. I'm sure that is the author's intent, and it works. I went back and tried to find the "eye" and could not. But I did notice these lines, which I especially like:

move to higher ground
because a hurricane will not
rearrange its creativity for you
& the river will meet the ocean in
the lake of your flesh again

I watched "When The Levees Broke", Spike Lee's documentary on Katrina a couple of months ago. It must have been in my Netflix queue for quite a while (I'm embarrassed to say how long that queue is). It felt odd to watch. In some ways Katrina feels like ancient history, and yet it was less than four years ago. And in some ways it feels like yesterday, and yet it was four long years ago.

I think I should have watched this DVD either earlier or a few years down the road, because I had a hard time focusing and integrating what it covered - it was like something far too familiar and yet far too removed at the same time. Production quality was great. As far as I recall, Lee used no voiceover, it was all seamless narrative by persons talking about their own experience.

I would really like to see an equivalent documentary on how and where survivors are now and how the city has changed and is changing. I'd also like to see a documentary about reality vs. sensationalism and how even reporting intended to be objective can fail (e.g. calling people stealing televisions and people stealing food and supplies "looters" when they were actually engaged in very different activities); how much actual violence there was vs. how much was initially reported - remember the news reports of large scale rapes of tourists - did that actually happen? I doubt it, although I'm certain some or even many bad acts did occur. And why so much focus on people engaged in bad acts (even if true) and almost no focus on people helping their neighbors and aiding the stranded elderly, etc.? I'm sure that occurred too and I have a feeling that the demographics of those involved might have skewed the focus of the reporting a bit. Errol Morris could do a good job on this particular project.

I highly recommend Lee's documentary from a few years ago, "Four Little Girls", it is about some children firebombed while attending Sunday school back in the civil rights era, and the background and aftermath of the bombing. When The Levees Broke is good, but for me not quite on par with Four Little Girls, which I don't think has received the attention it deserves.

I seem to have strayed quite a bit from the poem itself. Back to the business at hand!

Theresa

This was a raw & truthful poem. That takes you back into the horrifying time that New Orleans suffered. Excellent, and expressive writing.

Poet Jayne Cortez was born in Arizona, grew up in California, and currently lives in New York City. She is the author of ten books of poems, including Jazz Fan Looks Back, Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere, Fragments, Poetic Magnetic, Coagulations & Selected New Poems, and Firespitter.
She has performed her poetry with music on nine recordings, and her voice is celebrated for its political, surrealistic, dynamic, innovations in lyricism and visceral sound.
Cortez has presented her works and ideas at universities, museums and festivals in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, the Caribbean and the United States. Her poems have been translated into many languages and widely published in anthologies, journals and magazines. (Poetry Foundation)

Longtime Constant readers will remember we were set to have a grand 10th anniversary get-together in New Orleans in Sept. 2005. Then August 29, Katrina hit.

Talking About New Orleans
by Jayne Cortez

Talking about New Orleans
About deforestation & the flood of vodun paraphernalia
the Congo line losing its Congo
the funeral bands losing their funding
the killer winds humming intertribal warfare hums into
two storm-surges
touching down tonguing the ground
three thousand times in a circle of grief
four thousand times on a levee of lips
five thousand times between a fema of fangs
everything fiendish, fetid, funky, swollen, overheated
and splashed with blood & guts & drops of urinated gin
in syncopation with me
riding through on a refrigerator covered with
asphalt chips with pieces of ragtime music charts
torn photo mug shots & pulverized turtle shells from Biloxi
me bumping against a million-dollar oil rig
me in a ghost town floating on a river on top of a river
me with a hundred ton of crab legs
and no evacuation plan
me in a battered tree barking & howling with abandoned dogs
my cheeks stained with dried suicide kisses
my isolation rising with a rainbow of human corpse &
fecal rat bones
where is that fire chief in his big hat
where are the fucking pumps
the rescue boats
& the famous coalition of bullhorns calling out names
hey I want my red life jacket now
& I need some sacred sandbags
some fix-the-levee-powder
some blood-pressure-support-juice
some get-it-together-dust
some lucky-rooftop-charms &
some magic-helicopter-blades
I'm not prepared
to live on the bottom of the water like Oshun
I don't have a house built on stilts
I can't cross the sea like Olokun
I'm not equipped to walk on water like Marie Laveau
or swim away from a Titanic situation like Mr. Shine
Send in those paddling engineers
I'm inside of my insides
& I need to distinguish
between the nightmare, the mirage,
the dream and the hallucination
Give me statistics
how many residents died while waiting
how many drowned
how many suffocated
how many were dehydrated
how many were separated
how many are missing
how many had babies
and anyway
who's in charge of this confusion
this gulf coast engulfment
this displacement
this superdome shelter
this stench of stank
this demolition order
this crowded convention center chaos
making me crave solitary confinement

Am I on my own
exhausted from fighting racist policies
exhausted from fighting off sex offenders
exhausted from fighting for cots for tents for trailers
for a way out of this anxiety this fear this emptiness
this avoidance this unequal opportunity world of
disappointments accumulating in my undocumented eye
of no return tickets

Is this freedom is this global warming is this the new identity
me riding on a refrigerator through contaminated debris
talking to no one in particular
about a storm that became a hurricane
& a hurricane that got violent and started
eyeballing & whistling & stretching toward
a category three domination that caught me in
the numbness of my own consciousness
unprepared, unprotected and
made more vulnerable to destabilization
by the corporate installation of human greed, human poverty
human invention of racism & human neglect of the environment

I mean even Buddy Bolden came back to say
move to higher ground
because a hurricane will not
rearrange its creativity for you
& the river will meet the ocean in
the lake of your flesh again
so move to higher ground
and let your jungle find its new defense
let the smell of your wisdom restore the power of pure air
& let your intoxicated shoreline rumble above & beyond the
water-marks of disaster

I'm speaking of New Orleans of deportation
of belching bulldozers of poisonous snakes
of bruised bodies of instability and madness
mechanism of indifference and process of elimination
I'm talking about transformation about death re-entering life with
Bonne chance, bon ton roulé, bonjour & bonne vie in New Orleans, bon