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      December 29, 2019My One Time Agreeing with U.S. President Donald TrumpDawn Macdonald

      I never understood wind
      how it loops and loses
      soft ground, loess
       
      picking things up over here and
      putting them down over there
       
      you know you cannot keep
       
      scuffling with such big feet
       
      and how it grabs you and lets you
      go home saying, “oh, the wind.”
       
      the wind answers to different
      names—breeze, blow, gale,
      gust, low pressure outflow—
      but most often we say, “it’s windy,” and get no
      answer, can’t even hear
      you say, “it’s windy”—just see
      the lips move. the wind is all the sound.
      and I have never understood.
       
      there’s more to the wind, I think,
      than what we think.
      for a thought is but a twinge, a sputtered
      spark; the wind can strip bark and lay low
      oak, house, holiday
      umbrella, can blow the day dark.
       
      the wind is of the world and always
      chasing its tail, though it has
      nowhere to go, just around, and I could learn
      to stop standing, and still
      to let you know.
      I saw your lips move.
      words don’t matter.
      I saw the shapes of them,
      going up and down,
      and I say, though I don’t know,
      “I know,” and “yes.”

      from Poets Respond

      Dawn Macdonald

      “I wrote this poem based on the headline (‘I never understood wind’: Trump goes on bizarre tirade against wind turbines), but then went back to read the story, and found further points of contact. ‘I never understood wind,’ says U.S. President Donald Trump, and I have to agree with him—wind is baffling—even that word, ‘baffling,’ sounds like a word for a kind of wind. Okay, to be fair, he was talking about wind turbines, which have their pros (renewable energy) and cons (threats to wildlife among them), and which probably most readers of the article don’t understand in all their engineering detail. It almost doesn’t matter what he doesn’t understand—once you start with not understanding one thing, it spirals out into a whole chain of things to not understand until you’ve unstuck the entire layer of meaning from the world. So there!”

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