The wind has been moving things around again.
A dry leaf under the door.
A receipt from last Tuesday.
A newspaper folded open
to a face I have no reason to remember.
I collect them.
The leaf goes into the bin.
The receipt, into a drawer.
The face follows me to the kitchen.
Some thoughts have no use for doors.
They enter through the smallest available gap,
take a seat,
begin again where they left off.
I can be measuring rice
when an old conversation resumes.
I can be washing a cup
when a possible disaster requests consideration
from every available angle.
There is a particular kind of fear
that makes a person stay indoors
even when the room has become unbearable.
I have called it cowardice.
I have called it hibernation.
I have tried other names.
I have watched the days gather outside
like people waiting for a house to open.
Sometimes I try to leave one condition of mind
and return to the body.
There is the floor.
The weight of the feet.
The cup in my hand.
The ordinary business of being located somewhere.
But even this return acquires an audience.
The characters are watching
the other me leave the scene.
They watch her become the one
who is supposed to be here,
the one with a body, a family,
a room that apparently belongs to her,
and several people who know
what she ought to do with it.
Their watching brings me back
to the scene I was trying to leave.
I have to begin again.
Outside, a branch keeps knocking
against the window.
I cannot tell whether it is asking to enter
or trying to get out.
I look up the phrase: sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Hosea, eighth century BCE. Prophet of doom.
A warning about what a people cultivate
and what eventually grows from it.
I read about the destruction in the book,
then the promises of restoration,
then the tradition of Hosea's prayer,
the doom it was said to avert.
I have been reading about wind
for longer than I intended.
The phrase assumes a field,
a hand scattering seed,
some relationship between action and consequence.
What does the wind assume?
It moves the neighbour's washing,
pollen, ash, the fine remains of a roof.
It carries things that never agreed
to become part of its journey.
I return to the room.
There is the family,
the familiar arrangements,
the instructions disguised as concern,
the small permitted dimensions of a life.
Reality has its own weather.
It presses against the skin
with the dull persistence of furniture
that cannot be moved.
The first job was a bad room
with bad people in it.
The salary barely qualified as money.
I left with the peculiar exhaustion
of someone who has been underpaid
in more ways than one.
The second job felt like a discovery.
I liked the work.
I remember the relief of finding it,
the small astonishment
of being somewhere I wanted to work.
The work is still good.
The people have found other ways
to make it difficult.
The new contract arrived
with the old number in it.
No increase.
Same amount. Three contracts.
I read the figure again.
Numbers are very good at staying still
while everything around them deteriorates.
My father sends me job openings.
He knows the kind of work I would dislike.
He knows the kind of work I am absolutely unqualified for.
I think he knows I know this.
Still, the links arrive,
one after another,
as though the misery of this job
might eventually make his choices
resemble mine.
My sister and I do not speak.
Sometimes I think of how much
she has inherited from him.
She got almost everything.
I got the scream.
My mother and I are like
two people drowning in the same well.
We keep reaching for each other
because there is no one else
within reach.
Sometimes a hand is a hand.
Sometimes it is the thing
that pushes the other under.
Even that, perhaps,
in a reduced quantity.
A quarter-strength inheritance,
diluted somewhere between
his throat and mine.
His voice could occupy a house.
Mine has to calculate
whether it is safe to leave the room.
I have been calling this fear.
Cowardice, sometimes.
The family has other names for it,
I imagine.
There are so many names
for a daughter who does not move
when someone points towards a door.
I had thought returning would mean
the end of the investigation.
Instead, I am here,
trying to determine which part of the day
I am allowed to inhabit.
The branch knocks again.
I listen.
The wind has not answered.
It has never needed to.
~ Oizys.
Wrote this for dVerse OpenLinkNight # 419 on 05 Nov 2026. I am super late, as usual, but I took my sweet time and somehow turned a pseudo-rant + stream of consciousness into something resembling a poem.
Some notes, echoes and listening.
- Hosea 8:7 — “Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind” - The verse belongs to a prophetic warning about Israel's conduct and its consequences. The wind in the poem begins with this image of sowing and reaping, then moves beyond the logic of cause and consequence.
- Hosea 14 — A promise of restoration - A countercurrent to the destruction and judgement elsewhere in the book.
- “The Wind” — Yusuf / Cat Stevens (1971) - A song about listening to the wind and the soul, and the uncertainty of where one will end up.
- “Listening Wind” — Talking Heads, Remain in Light (1980) - A darker political song about alienation, intrusion, and resistance. Its wind carries a very different history from the one in this poem.
- Listen! The Wind — Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1938) - An account of the Lindberghs' 1933 transatlantic survey flight, in which wind and weather become practical forces that determine what can and cannot happen.