Friday Writings #66: In the Face of Disaster

 

Hello again, dear Wordsmiths.

Time to get serious!

My brother lives in Auckland, New Zealand, where lately there have been bad floods and nearby a devastating cyclone. He suffered only a wrecked front fence himself, but plenty of other people fared much worse. He is angry now because he thinks world leaders are not making enough connection between such disasters and climate change, not doing enough to address that.

Where I live, recent nights of heavy rain felt scary no matter how I rationalised, because of the two severe floods we had a year ago, and the one before that in 2017 – and I was far from the only person to feel that way. 

But what can we do in the face of these disasters – we, the people not in positions of political power, not enjoying the huge wealth which also bestows power, all too aware of the problem and also aware that it’s going to take more to fix than we can do as individuals?

Is there something we can do collectively? Could the individual efforts even add up to enough after all? Is time running out or is it on our side? Can writing do anything at all to help?

Well, at the very least, writing can relieve our feelings. And maybe writing to our politicians might sway them in the right direction, or writing for the public might wake up some more people or inspire them to further action.

Be that as it may, what would you write in the face of disaster? What will you write? It’s your prompt for this week, if you choose to use it. 

Otherwise feel free to write about anything else at all … after all, it may be that everything we write now is ‘in the face of disaster’ anyway, as we experience these dramatic climate events all over the world.  And then there are wars, and viruses....

Or are you experiencing some even more personal disaster? I hope not! But if so, letting off steam might help.

Not meaning to be a doom-and-gloom merchant, folks. Perhaps what one can write in the face of disaster is something cheerful and/or hopeful, to make us all feel less despairing. Perhaps we can write about some of the good things that are being done to help in dire world situations.

One post per person, please; verse or prose, new or old; 369 words maximum. Please read and comment on other people’s posts – and if you’d care to talk to us in the comments here below, that would be lovely.

Next week, Magaly will invite us to create poetry or prose inspired by a line from our own Marja: “Write love letters to wild flowers”.

This image, by Colin Lloyd from Unsplash, reminds me of the state of some of our local roads after our floods – several still not repaired a year later, because there was just so much devastation to address.