Quake memories

For some reason, there's a ... well, I guess I'd have to call it a meme going around to post your "where was I when..." memories of the Loma Prieta quake. Not sure why it's a thing on this year's anniversary when next year will be the 25th anniversary. (Ack! 25 years since Loma Prieta? Where does the time go?) Rather than a reminiscence, I thought I'd contribute with the song I wrote afterward. Sorry for not pointing to a recording, but it never seems to have ended up in any filk collections. (Many of my best songs never did. Probably never will at this point.) Never ended up in any songbooks either for that matter -- no, wait, Google claims it was in the Concerto convention songbook in 1990. Good luck finding a copy. Which is a pity, because the lyrics are fairly free-form rhythmically, so it doesn't work nearly as well as a poem than as a song.

The Dragon and the Phoenix
(copyright 1989 Heather Rose Jones, all rights reserved)

The lower deck of eight-eighty -- it wasn’t the traffic so loud,
Series fans at Candlestick -- it wasn’t the roar of the crowd,
Five-oh-four on a Tuesday -- commuters out over the bay,
It wasn’t the wind that caught the bridge and made it buck and sway,

For the dragon woke and twisted with a sudden earthy sound,
And like in some child’s skipping rhyme, the bridge has fallen down,
A freeway cracks and crumbles with an awful roaring noise,
Concrete, cars, and rebar, like a heap of broken toys.


In the silence that follows -- the sirens and the screams,
Stark against the skyline -- the bent and the broken beams,
A smell of gas in the wreckage, a spark from a broken wire,
The silence again is broken by a rush of hungry fire.

And the phoenix screams in anger, as it beats its flaming wings,
Above the dragon’s roaring we hear it as it sings,
It’s singing out over the city, and it’s singing in our hearts,
We shiver, blink, and waken -- and once again time starts.


Someone goes back in a building -- helps an old man down the stair,
Someone’s directing the traffic -- waving them on with a flare,
Someone climbs up on a roadway, and starts to pry open a door,
Some people grab a fire hose, and run it down to the shore.

And the dragon stirs and grumbles, but we barely pay it mind,
As we search among the ruins for whatever we can find,
And where the salt bay water has quenched the fire’s glow,
A phoenix egg lies hatching, to wake, and fly, and grow.


Now we will heal the people -- the cuts and the broken bones,
We will repair the buildings -- the glass and the shattered stones,
We will respan the bridges, and we will bury the dead,
And we will banish the demons, that haunt us each night in bed.

And we will rebuild the houses -- on the mud flats and the sand,
And we will rebuild the freeways -- stacked high above the land,
And we will ignore the dragon, for as long as we can pretend,
But, like the phoenix, will we now rebuild -- just to burn again?