Cangrejos

Cangrejos

On dark, silty mud
Besides a still creek,
With the odor of so many things,
Becoming something else,
Scampered a funny-looking crowd
Of fiddle crabs,
Many memories ago.

It may help to know that I was expected elsewhere,
But not missed.
That such mornings
Were meant for the spaces between lines
And margins,
Where, curling downward,
Gees bottomed out one floor below
And tees got to touch the ceiling.

It would seem forgettable now,
My canvas All-Stars sinking into the sticky gook,
Leaving a tell-tale crust.
But it made for a shameful feeling,
Low down,
Like I had soiled my pants
Or made up my own world
And there’d be hell to pay for it later
(Maybe just for the company I kept).

It may even tell you something to know,
That I could hear my classmates from where I stood,
Their utterances melded into an uneven hum.

Cangrejos,
They held their oversized claw with such intention.
I watched these odd little things,
Who did not have school,
But seemed anxious nevertheless.

Watch me now,
Lording over them.
With something as inconsequential as my shadow
I panic them back into their black,
Soft-sided underworld.

They, in their aggregate,
Had made this shore like the moon,
Yet another place I am certain
I was not allowed to be.
The rim of each of their borrows,
Was edged with the discards of their diggings,
Something the tide would undo.

It may shed some light to say,
That grown, but not regretful,
I saw them again,
As if not a minute had passed.

But now the footbridge under which I had stood,
Was upturned like the hulk of a ship,
Bullied downstream by Hurricane Hugo,
In September of 1989.
The gap instantly planted the ache
Of impotence in me,
And brought back a memory
Of a last day of school
On which I had stood, mid-span
And scattered my spiral bound shame
To the stench
And the unblinking stemmed eyes
Of cangrejos.

I turned to my old path to find
That the concrete abutments had stood their ground,
But now hid behind the overgrowth
Of sharp-edged grass growing like sugar cane.
Stumbling away,
I found a time-stained baseball in the thicket
And felt saddest
At the thought that a game
Had been called for lack of a ball.

Francisco Hernandez

1933 Hurricane Season

Three black whales snorkeling in wind eye

Hurricane Celia, September 1962
This notation, probably scribbled by a navigator on a reconnaissance flight, sets my imagination on fire. I can not get the image out of my mind's eye, nor would I want to.
Francisco

These photos worth many more words

"Here is Donald showing us pictures, among what was left from Katrina, that he had taken during Hurricane Andrew when he lived in Florida."

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