O Hell, hello, an O of grief:
the eye of Hurricane Milton
spends its wide wrath,
darkening the world.
Climatology a talent
useless against false shepherds
swollen with profane wind.
Once the blind poet
rose from the pool of Styx,
invoking holy light
to flood his song. “Blind mouths,”
he called those sham prophets
while he still had sight.
The contrary: the muteness of an eye.
Jennifer Davis Michael is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of two chapbooks, both from Finishing Line Press: Let Me Let Go (2020) and Dubious Breath (2022). Her poem "Forty Trochees" was selected by Rachel Hadas for the Frost Farm Prize in Metrical Poetry (2020). She has published several poems previously in The New Verse News.