HURRICANE HAZEL, 1954

You were in a wheel­bar­row that day

when the wind overturned

trees, trash­cans,

and I was being born.

In the pavil­ion Hazel foamed

while Furies hovered above,

their hands wrung with joy.

She kept me deadlocked

like Julius Caesar

in a pool of blood.

Then you diverted

oh so smoothly

my Hazel’s wrath.

What color are her eyes?

You won­dered.

Of the sea, she said, look.

You looked bay-ward and saw

the oblique horizon merge

here with sky, there with swamp,

faith­ful to neither.

Then looking blood-ward you saw me,

grey-eyed like Athena.

Tatiana Retivov received a B.A. in English Lit­er­a­ture from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Montana and an M.A. in Slavic Lan­guages and Lit­er­a­ture from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan. She has lived in Kyiv, Ukraine since 1994, where she runs an Art & Lit­er­a­ture Salon and a small pub­lish­ing press: www.kayalapublishing.com that pub­lish­es prose, poetry, and non-fiction in Ukraine.