The clouds were low and hairy in the skies

Once by the Pacific
by Robert Frost

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent Was coming,
and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.


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I have always loved this poem.
In fact, I have always been a Robert Frost fan because he was such a grumpy, old man.
I got his grumpiness. His cantankerousness.
I understood it.
He was "ticked off"off about a lot of things;
yet
he wrote beautiful poetry.

It's been a weird year, weather wise -- the tornadoes, the hail, the hard rains. The other night David and I were on the deck, and this storm blew in. As I took these pictures, I thought of this line from Frost's poem: "the clouds were low and hairy in the skies..."

:)

ETA: As David and I drove through Marietta on Monday night, we passed a house across from Marietta Junior High that was home to many old, as well as large, hard woods. After the storm we had last week, a huge oak from that house had blown down and part of it lay on school property. Falling down during a storm we had last Thursday, we assumed, it must have made a terrific noise as it barely missed the neighboring house but crushed everything in its path. The roots of the oak were so huge that it pulled up the concrete of the driveway in one gigantic section like it was a piece of carpet.
The scene was surreal.

One other note: In Rabun County last month, a tornado touched down at Lake Burton where it destroyed fifteen homes and killed one lake dweller. Ivy, a girl who works at our favorite restaurant in Clayton, which is east of Lake Burton, told us that after the storm passed by , she and her boyfriend went outside to survey the damage. As they stood there, sawdust rained down on them for almost five minutes. Ivy noted that it took her and her boyfriend a few minutes to figure out that it was from all the trees that had been destroyed.