exposed, larger than life,/ and due to break my neck’. ‘Storm Warnings’ reminds us that we ignored warnings about fossil fuels for years because we considered ourselves more powerful than nature. The many catastrophic weather events of recent years can leave us in no doubt about nature’s power. Similarly, we can experience ‘storms’ of emotions in our hearts and minds, which can make us feel just as powerless as nature can: ‘Weather abroad/ And weather in the heart alike come on/ Regardless of prediction.’ Rich mocks the very inventions we might consider ingenious, such as clocks, barometers and sophisticated radars. All these instruments do is record and attest to nature’s ultimate power: ‘Between foreseeing and averting change/ Lies all the mastery of elements/ Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.’ We are similarly powerless against the relentless onslaught of time. We cannot rewind or pause it, no matter how many watches or clocks we own: ‘Time in the hand is not control of time’. The very instruments we use to predict weather are themselves at the mercy of the elements, like the smashed barometer in this poem: ‘Nor shattered fragments of an instrument/ A proof against the winds’. This poem concludes by acknowledging that human beings are ultimately powerless against nature, time and our own complicated feelings: ‘the wind will rise,/ We can only close the shutters.’
The most important poem to bear in mind when considering Rich’s exploration of this theme is her poem ‘Power’. This extraordinary poem considers chemical and physical power alongside personal power. The title refers to the elements Marie Curie discovered, polonium and radium. Curie knew they were powerful, and even coined the term ‘radioactive’, but she still handled them freely and was so engrossed in studying them that she failed to see she was not immune to their tremendous power: ‘her body bombarded for years by the element/ she had purified’. Curie made the tragic mistake of allowing familiarity with these elements to make her feel safe around them, and to ignore or deny their power: ‘It seems she denied to the end/ the source of the cataracts on her eyes’. Curie was one of, if not the most, intelligent women of her age (or any age), yet she refused to see what was glaringly obvious – the cataracts blinding her and the ‘cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends’ which made her incapable of holding ‘a test-tube or a pencil’.
