She Blew Her Top

When they left the farm, moved into town,
the tiny kitchen held only one prize:
Out the window, its summit visible
as my grandmother washed dishes.

Since men watched TV and women prepared food,
I came to know the view well:
blue Western sky, white conical mountain,
emerging from brown lesser hills.

Legend says St. Helens was an old guardian.
Rewarding her loyalty, Great Spirit transformed her
into the most beautiful of all mountains.

In 1980, it was enough.

Some promise reneged
or loyalty not properly rewarded.
Like any woman kept in place too long,
not able to move of her own free will,
she had to bust out.

She blew her top.

Only 12, a year into my womanhood,
I had already felt the early embers of rage:
relegated to restricted roles, place of no outward movement.
Had felt the urge to erupt, to destroy all that stood in my path.

She erupted, miles-high plumes of steam,
spewing boiling mud, grey ash.
Devastation tallied in
human deaths,
drowned animals,
downed trees,
demolished structures.

Years later, both grandparents dead,
me with my own daughter to raise,
I gazed at the still-sky, ever-hills, but gone-peak.

Initially scientists calculated what was razed.
A quarter century on, their point of reference
is not destruction, but what has since been reborn.