Gerri Leen
Smoke and Mist
She serves two compulsions
Opponents in a constant
War for her focus, dragging her
Into the wild, free from
Her cage of expectations
Of rules and how things are done
Allowing her to return to basics, to earth
And wind, to fire and water
For she is Destruction
Blazing like a wildfire
Like magma oozing liquid flame
Like the spark of a firefly times
One thousand but then
There’s her other side
Bringing the coolness of Compassion
Dowsing the anger, the rage
Soaking the charred rubble
The still-smoking log
Enticing the quivering doe back
Into the thicket, bare now but safe
Cool droplets laying mercy all around
But just beyond is a clearing or a grove
With more kindling waiting
For the rising need to engulf
To leave nothing but carnage
It its wake—all this in her soul
In her mind, in the way she carries herself
Walking carefully over the uneven
Ground, listening to the calls as the soft
Murmur of compassion says: “Look at them
Help them,” while destruction’s throaty whisper
Urges her to “Burn it—burn it all down”
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Gerri Leen is an award-nominated poet from Northern Virginia who’s into horse racing, tea, and collecting encaustic art and raku pottery. She has poetry published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Dark Matter, The HWA Poetry Showcase, Dreams & Nightmares, and others, and has recently published her first poetry collection, Unwilling: Poems of Horror and Darkness. Visit gerrileen.com to see what she’s been up to.
Author’s Backstory: I am drawn to duality. This poem is two things: the way nature brings both destruction and mercy and a woman serving two powerful mistresses. It’s appropriate you asked me this today. The temperature was in the mid-90s, and I was taking my garbage to the curb, and here comes this pop-up storm. And the rain was so cold. I’d been burning up, and now I was rain-spattered but so much more comfortable. Nature is both cruel and kind. On a more personal note, I have a house full of goddesses (and a few gods) from many pantheons. But without a doubt, the majority represent goddesses of mercy (Kuan Yin, Kannon, and Tara primarily) and goddesses of destruction (Kali, Sekhmet, and the Morrigan). Balancing such opposing energies can be quite a trick. But sometimes they coexist in a beautiful, if uneasy, equilibrium.
Editor’s Comments and Image Credit: When “an abstract representation of the battle Mother Nature wages between global warming and global cooling” produced the image (Wixel), a reverse image search showed that this image is a far more detailed piece of abstract art than what was found on Fy!Art and other platforms.