Hurricane, c. 2030

It was category five, the third in as many months.
The book was thumbed again; they named him Nathan.
Romping in Emily's path awhile, he soon made off
on a deviously different course. But the mind

of the wind was known. Five days before
young Nathan found his feet, his cataclysmic dreams
were modelled in high resolution, and his courses
mapped and measured to the yard. And fill the sky
with roofs or brandish bridges as he might, the people
were all gone. All but a very few -

an oddball solitary who saw his rescuers off
with a salutory salvo, a company of twelve
snuggled in the basement of some Church of Grace -

were off to breezy towns a hundred miles away.
In cars and buses heading west and east,
the children of the cities, free of school for now,
chattering, questioning, pointing at their screens,
contrived with their elders ways to live on Earth.