Humanist Voices in Verse: “To Weathermen”

This week’s poem is by Daniel Thomas Moran, TheHumanist.com poetry editor, retired dentist and Boston University Assistant Professor, former Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, New York and the author of seven collections of poetry. He lives in Webster, New Hampshire with his wife, Karen, where he has taken on the role of Unemployed Poet and Anecdotalist.

His recently published collection of poems, A Shed for Wood, has been lauded for its “profound and intelligible poetry” (author Peter Quinn) while Moran is described as “a distinctive American voice which deserves an attentive hearing” (Elizabeth Heywood, Acumen Literary Journal). His website is www.danielthomasmoran.net.

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To Weathermen

You forever
stay put, there
before your
many geographies.
A pig-tail of wire
dives from your ear
into your blazer collar.
How you must suffer,
imprisoned there
in that windowless space,
preaching well
beyond the wee hours
of fronts and gales,
raindrops on floodplains,
groundstrikes and hailstones,
dark followed by

day.

Santa Anna Nor’easter
Bermuda High Heatpump
Waterspouts Snowmakers
The Melting Polar Icecap.
Nine on a scale of ten.
Bonechill and frying eggs
on the sidewalk.
Taking a look from space.
If only
you could step
outside.
Live for
the moments.
Tell us when
it will
all end and

how.

— Daniel Thomas Moran