Ephemera from the Museum of Myself - Storm Warnings

I first read "Storm Warnings" in my AP English class in 2004, and it's stayed with me ever since, still one of my very favorite poems. So much of the literature I love, I first discovered in high school, from Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood to Virginia Woolf and John Steinbeck. It was a time where we were encouraged to sit with a book and really consider it.

And yet, looking through my papers for my last English class of high school made me realize that it was actually really a struggle for me, something I'd forgotten in the eleven years since. The class, which taught to both the Literature and the Language exam, was very technical, and to this day, I still struggle with the technical aspects of language, even as I've fallen in love again and again with its more playful aspects.

In any event, this is a poem I never struggled with, funny as my little notes on it may be. It struck my heart when I first read it, and every re-reading since strikes my heart again. How dear to know a few poems that make us ache the same, even a decade later.