SHORTLISTED

SONIA FARMER

Compiled from the pages of “Hurricane in The Bahamas” by Terence Keogh, a first-hand account of this tourist’s experience surviving the 1932 Great Abaco Hurricane, published one year after it made landfall, in Harper’s Monthly Magazine.

We had ideal weather all the time
in a place called home
where we again lived
in danger of
another twenty-four hours

we were moving away
and toward
the prospect of
a normal storm

the past
remained just as it had been
nailed fast
to the special moorings
of the future

I thought there was
a destination
unable to see the condition
of this passage
fast as it was

our harbor changed

that is not
my body
any more

we left
on a plank

carrying nothing
and from nowhere

bound by something
trying all the time to remain

crawling upon
hands and knees
every joint creaked

but only the wildest howl
could be heard
roaring the place down.

Any prayer
smashed to pieces

like a shower of leaves
hurtling through the air

and being sent off
to leeward death

all this time
I had regard
for the laws of gravitation.

the building
was collapsing
in my arms.

picked up off my feet
my hands sang out
to grip the mystery
that keeps an airplane flying
on a puff of wind

knocked to earth
devo-tion
poured down on my back

and that wreckage
became some kind of final shelter
on top of me

Sonia Farmer is a writer, visual artist, small press publisher, and educator who uses books and their allied crafts to interrogate Caribbean archives. Through Poinciana Paper Press, the Center for Writing, Book Arts & Publishing she founded in Nassau, The Bahamas, she works with writers and artists through classes, residencies, and publishing projects to advance cultural ownership and voice in Caribbean narratives. She has self-published various poetry collections, chapbooks, and artist’s books, including “Infidelities” (longlisted for the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature) and “A True & Exact History” (winner of the 2019 Holle Award for Excellence in Book Arts & semi-finalist, the MCBA Prize). Her poetry has won the 2011 Prize in the Small Axe Literary Competition and been shortlisted for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize. She holds a BFA in Writing from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa.