It was a little over a year ago that we had a power outage that lasted two days or so. There was also deep snow and bitter cold, making it pretty miserable. We still tell the stories–about who rounded up a generator, who tried to sleep on a pew at the church, who cooked in their fireplace. But it struck me that most of us seemed content to plow through the crisis on our own. Here’s the poem that outage inspired.
POWER OUTAGE
IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY
It wasn’t the loss of electricity
so much as the not knowing
when it would be back.
The snow was deep and we could
see neighbor’s houses from our windows.
But somehow the reaching out was hard,
too much when keeping warm and fed
was everything. Too strange with no
electronic buffer between us.
And so we hunkered.
Then the lights and the television
and the computer came back on
and we all reached for the phone,
for e-mail, for Facebook pages,
called out with stories of how we
survived . . .
. . . on our own.
Meet Sarah
