Waxing poetical about false alarms
By Daniel Gelinas
Updated Fri January 22, 2010
Couldn't resist blogging about this interesting little item. Going through my Google Alerts this morning and came across this crisp little, lyrical moment captured in a pretty piece of poetry.
A blogger going by the handle Feed Store Girl has created a haiku dedicated to the false alarm. As an English major, I'm fond of language, am wooed by words choreographed into associations of poetry and prose. So I was gratified to see someone address the violent juxtaposition to normal life of the false alarm (something to which I dedicate a large portion of my working, reporting life) in a tidy tidbit of verse.
I love, especially, the last line, which captures the shifts in emotion that come from the scream of a siren in the middle of the night... shift... to the feelings of contrition for worrying everyone over nothing... shift... to the feeling of relief that nothing was wrong. I linked the haiku above, but here it is in all it's brevity and entirety:
Four a.m. Choteau Siren wailing, come, hurry! Sorry. No fire. Whew.Not addressed in the haiku, but potentially there or imminent, are the feelings of irritation that the alarm went off without reason, yet again... and feelings of being raked for cash when the false alarm fine arrives in the mail.
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