Poetry By Eleanor Cade Busby

 Warren LeMay CC



HEROIN WEATHER

Does not arrive politely.
No gentle drizzle. No courteous tapping at the shutters.
It comes the way August storms come to dying mill towns,
thick-bellied and electric,
air swollen green-black with promise and threat,
the whole horizon humming like power lines about to give up and scream.

And people who have never stood in that weather
love to talk about weakness
from the safety of dry porches.

But they have never felt that pressure in the bones.
That metallic taste behind the teeth.
The strange holy silence before impact when even the birds disappear
and the world seems to crouch low, waiting.

H waits like that. Not ugly at first.
God no.
At first it is heat lightning over distant fields,
beautiful enough to make farmers stop mid-sentence,
beautiful enough to make a woman step barefoot into the yard
with her hair lifting in charged wind
while every ancestor in her blood whispers
Go back inside.

But the sky is dazzling.
And loneliness is a dry riverbed begging for rain.

So the storm enters.

It rolls through veins soft as thunder over mountains,
slow and magnificent,
making every grief in the body kneel down at once.
The dead stop talking.
The old panic folds its claws.
The heart unclenches like a fist opening underwater.

For one impossible moment
everything cruel grows quiet.

And that is the seduction no sermon ever explains The silence.

The terrible mercy of silence.

But storms do not love the towns they flood.

Soon comes the rot smell of soaked carpets and mold,
the transformers exploding blue at midnight,
trees split open like broken ribs across the road.
Dogs shaking under kitchen tables.
Mothers standing at windows counting sirens.

And still the body remembers the first rain
like betrayed earth remembers spring.

Even while fearing it.
Even while boarding up windows.
Even while swearing never again.

Because addiction is not devotion.
It is standing on a porch in tornado weather
watching the black funnel turn toward you
and feeling horror
and hunger
arrive in the very same heartbeat.

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Eleanor Cade Busby is a Maine poet, playwright, and storyteller whose work explores memory, loss, protest, humor, and the fierce tenderness of ordinary lives. Her poetry often weaves together personal history with larger human struggles, finding beauty in flawed people and broken places. Deeply influenced by the loss of her beloved friend Snow more than fifty years ago, she writes with compassion for those caught in addiction, grief, and survival, believing poetry can carry both witness and mercy across generations.
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