Today’s poem refers to the Potato Blight, a fungus which attacks potatoes and contributed to the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s. Even today, the weather forecast talks about “Blight Weather”, which is unusually warm and humid for Ireland, as those are the conditions in which the fungus thrives. I have connected this with the psychological dread of the all the problems in the world today and the related fear of the future.
BLIGHT WEATHER
The days stand in warm, unseasonal puddles,
but the tired man stuffed with emptiness and fear
feels a monumental drought in his mind.
He is afraid of rousing the echo
and knows the future is hunting him down,
waiting to shoot the void dead centre.
This perennial fungus feeds on the past,
eating away the membrane that divides it
from the present and spreading a prediction
to be endured in colours only imagined
and just starting to try to name themselves;
a symbiosis of dream and waking.
S.C. Flynn 