People open wide their hearts, and give whate’r they can
To fellow man that hurts and smarts, Great is man, Great is man!
Charities, in fullest bloom, all lend their helping hand,
Gifts and prayers offered zoom to heaven without end.



Here come the magnificent! - austere, as they arrive,
Army, Navy, Coastguard troops, to rescue human life.
Riding on their stallions high to save their native shore,
Chinooks, Black Hawks fill the sky and other copters more.

Take the horror in a stride - they have a job to do,-
Defending native land and fight - praise the angelic crew!
Archangels with helmets they, of our present day,
Angels with austerity, leading all the way.

Each of them a Spartan Star, hail the fighting man!
Praise the saving warrior bards, praise him with ink and pen!
They call life back from the brink, lifting the prostrate,
Poet peers! let flow your ink to well commemorate.

Celestial host of modern day, so powerful a host,
That brings succor without delay to those that need it most.
Bow glib pundit bureaucrats before the warrior!
That sacrifices, dies and saves, and makes your jobs secure.

Lo! what bard can overlook their valiant succor,
Black Hawks, Chenooks, Coast Guard ships, hear their fleet wings roar.
Dealing with the agony that smote their southern land,
Fresh returning from a war, yet lend at once their hand.

Work of many decades lost, t‘breaks the heart- grim waste
Lies for miles along the coast, with kin lost or displaced,
Desolate so many a town, desolate the strand,
Weeping those that lost their own, and lost their homes and land.

Army Corps of Engineers, go from place to place,
Searches but confirm their fears in the clean-up phase.
What will be the number of Katrina’s casualties,
When she turned north-east to scoff at more communities?.

Vehicles amphibious cut through the filthy spate,
Where rodents of mosquitoes breed, and varmints incubate.
It's Venice, beauteous Venice but- with long lagoons of slime,
Where hungry desperados dwell that to the roof top climb.

Some, obsessed to denigrate FOX News’ O’Reilly Bill,
Find sustenance and daily bread, with blah blah blah and ill.
Finger pointing has begun, with fingers thin or plump,
Upon the shining Hill on high, and others in a dump.

The Gulf Coast’s Venice, New Orleans, is Venice out of Hell,
With plazas where Fra Morte gleans and rotten bodies smell;
Venice dear of Italy, with many a famed lagoon,
Compete with woe and misery that sees no waxing moon.

Romantic gondolas cut their way, through sludge with filthy oars,
When rescue troops in great dismay knock on resisting doors.
Pray leave it to the competent to renovate levees,
Levees that never could withstand Katrina’s fletching teeth.

San Marco is the Vieux Quartier, (Big Easy’s French Quartier)
And gondolas NOPD glide ‘long the wasted quay.
Disaster makes ingenious shocked people everywhere,
They sail or vigorously row upon a frigidaire.

Children severed from their kin, that seek their families,
Lost their parents, friends and home,- are poor evacuees;
Challenge superhuman this, - challenging mere clay,
To meet gargantuan challenges, man has got to pray!.

Pumps are working, hear them churn,- are pumping out the spate,
But grief! ill luck! they had to learn it was by far too late.
Tough labor to categorize the bloated bodies found,
Or scrutinize and analyze those lying still around.

Uninhabitable is, Waveland and Gulfport,
Who can make of horror sense - no one but the Lord.
Missisippi, lying flat for miles along her coast,
Reeling from the deadly blow - can not of tourists boast.

Anger never minimize alike some prickly pears,
Repressing it costs high a prize, and many wasted tears.
Repression is a fallacy, delusion great and vain,
For stuffing anger will increase frustration with more pain.

Man is smitten and brought low, lo! but man is Great~
Man is weak and strong and great -
Man is in His image made.
Made in the image of the ONE who controls his fate.
Ineffaceably His image, though he be brought low,
Praise the Matrix of this image, praise HIM here and now.
Man is frail, yet strong and great,- for man can understand,
Man can know HIS purposes - are benevolent.

© Elizabeth Dandy