underdogishere

The title of this post was the headline in our local newspaper this morning. For those of you who don't know, Palm Bay is the city where I live.

Currently, there are no fires near my neighborhood, but the blowing columns of smoke are clearly visible. It's very, very dry -- the rains haven't started yet -- and very hot. The fires are believed to have been set by an arsonist, possibly driving a blue van. Fires have also been burning near the city of Cocoa, about fifteen miles north, and near Daytona, about sixty miles north. They've been burning since Sunday, Mother's Day. Somewhere between fifty and seventy homes have been destroyed. School has been cancelled today throughout the entire city of Palm Bay.

I don't have television, but yesterday I ate lunch in a restaurant that had a TV tuned to the news, and it cycled constantly between our fires, the tornadoes that have been seeming to hit the Midwest every day, the cyclone in Burma, and the earthquake in China. Not what you would call a slow news day.

It's been a while since I took part in Haiku Tuesday, but I thought I would today. The observance of Mother's Day was first proposed by Julia Ward Howe in response to the suffering of mothers during the American Civil War, and this (sorry) haiku is dedicated to a mother in China who was interviewed on NPR this morning:

It's not about me.
It's my children, dear God. How
can I save them? How?

Labels: Haiku