Let’s hope Cape Breton wasn’t kidding

when they said we could move there

from this side if things got crazy scary.


The ones who shout hardest hardly

ever have it right, since such small

gods surge from somewhere far


back in the night. Light fills space

as it can. Dark does the same,

and the space is a brain. Attackers


were attacked, so now their best

work is done behind walls where

whoever they ruin won’t clutter up


the compound. They can’t see what

runs loose in the reaping, or that

meanness won’t mend them.


Neither will screaming. An entire country

standing up in arms out in the street,

straight in the path of the storm.

Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary and poetry publications. In 2018, she won first place in both the Keats-Shelley Prize for adult poetry and the New York State Fair poetry competition.