Affirmations of the Powerless: A Villanelle after Helene

We are ok. We are alive.
The streets are full of trees and wires.
We have a house. We sleep inside.

The autumn trees that still survive
drop leaves instead of limbs. Mud’s mires
dry, ok. We are alive.

Without power we contrive
hot meals: pizzas baked right on the fire.
We have a yard. We eat outside.

I wonder on the morning drive
which houses still have occupiers.
Which are ok? Which still hold lives?

At the airport when I arrive
a Lake Lure guard justifies
“I have a house to sleep inside,

my neighbors don’t.” She confides.
We repeat our mollifiers.
“We are ok. We are alive.
We have a house to live inside.”

*

Stand of Birches

There’s an air of Eden in the Autumn,
a gold-gilded glow of sun through leaves.
The paper trees whisper presence
as we tread the thin red path between them.
Baby hands reach toward brilliant blue.
It peeks through the cathedral arches
and she coos, and tries to catch light columns
leaning between the trees from the stained glass roof.
She has not known the fall. The way the leaves
brown and crumble, soiling the forest floor
covering caterpillar chrysalises where
crawling bellies unmake themselves,
to build wings from nature’s sweetness.
She only knows summer’s verdant green
and now the sheen of all earth shimmering.

*

Christiana Doucette builds miniatures, because details create scenes. She brings that attention to her verse. As 2024 Kay Yoder Scholarship for History recipient and a judge for San Diego Writer’s Festival, her poetry has been performed on NPR. Leslie Zampetti represents her. You can find some of her recent poetry in Rattle Poet’s Respond, County Lines, and Wild Peach.