Quote of the Day (Theodore Roethke, on an Arriving Storm)

“Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), from “The Storm,” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1975)

Undoubtedly, something like the scenario that Roethke evokes will play out here in the Northeast in the next day or so as the remnants of Hurricane Ida blow through.

The image accompanying this post, “The Storm,” by American painter Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828–1901), was created in 1881 and now hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.