Hurricanes
A storm with a name and an eye: write the weather that gets treated like a person.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about hurricanes: storm imagery, eye-of-the-storm structure, myths and craft, plus exercises, prompts and a quiz in this Writory guide.
What this theme is
Hurricanes are the only weather we introduce by name. Katrina, Maria, Haiyan: the storm arrives pre-personified, tracked for days on maps like an approaching relative, and that strange official intimacy is a gift to poets. A hurricane poem can play with the name, the she or he of the reports, the way a single word comes to mean a year, a neighbourhood, a before and after. No other disaster hands you its own character so readily.
The storm's structure is a second gift. A hurricane has an eye: a core of calm, blue sky and birdsong halfway through the destruction, followed by the wind returning from the opposite direction. Poetry has no readier built-in volta anywhere in nature. The approach, the first wall, the uncanny pause, the second half arriving from behind: the hurricane is practically a sonnet with a pressure system.
Why poets return to it
Poets write hurricanes because they compress a community's whole story into a week: forecast, denial, preparation, impact, and the long unglamorous after of tarpaulins and insurance. The theme accommodates every scale, from a single boarded window to an island's grief, and it raises the question lyric poetry handles best: what do people do with their hands and voices while something enormous decides their lives?
The eye offers craft training you can take anywhere. Learning to place a still centre inside a violent poem, and to make the reader dread the second half during the calm, is structural education of the highest order. Writory's judges, reading for structure and emotion among five criteria, tend to remember the hurricane poems that trust that pause.
Where it comes from
The word itself is Caribbean: 'hurricane' descends from Hurakan, the great storm deity of the Taino people, so the theme carries its mythology inside its own name. Shakespeare put the unnamed ancestor of these storms at the centre of 'The Tempest' and gave King Lear the theme's founding gesture, an old man on a heath commanding the winds to blow and crack their cheeks, human speech pitched impossibly against weather.
The modern hurricane poem belongs above all to the Caribbean's poets. Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, in their different musics, wrote the storm as history's echo, an annual reckoning bound up with the sea, colonial memory and survival; Brathwaite famously argued that the hurricane does not roar in pentameter, that Caribbean poetry needed rhythms answering its own weather. After Katrina in 2005 and Maria in 2017, American and Puerto Rican poets built a further literature of the named storm: elegy, testimony and anger in roughly equal parts.
The elements that carry it
- The forecast days, the cone on the map, queues for plywood and water, hold the theme's suspense and its arguments about staying or leaving.
- Boarded windows and taped glass, houses with their eyes shut, give the approach its most eloquent image of a town bracing.
- The eye's false calm, birds flying in the quiet, neighbours stepping out to look, is the theme's signature moment and its cruellest trick.
- Wind made visible, roofs peeling, a trampoline in a tree, rain travelling sideways, renders force through consequence rather than adjectives.
- The named aftermath, 'before Maria', 'after Katrina', shows a storm becoming a calendar, the theme's deepest mark on language.
Techniques that work
- Structure the poem as the storm is structured: build, first wall, eye, second wall, aftermath, and place your quietest lines exactly at the eye.
- Work the name. Let the poem notice the strangeness of a disaster with a person's name, the aunts and classmates called the same thing, the name retired afterwards like a jersey.
- Choose long, breath-taxing lines for the wind and abrupt short ones for what it snaps; Brathwaite's point stands, the storm should bend your rhythm, not obey it.
- Write the waiting: the radio, the filled bathtub, the last hot meal. Communities live the approach far longer than the impact, and the dread is where character shows.
- Ground the aftermath in specific labour, chainsaws at dawn, neighbours on one roof, the queue for ice, because recovery is the theme's longest and least-written act.
Mistakes to avoid
- 'Nature's fury battering the coast.' Report language, twice removed from experience; one garden gate travelling down the street says more than any fury.
- Skipping the eye. To leave out the storm's calm centre is to waste the theme's built-in turn and its most unsettling human moment.
- Writing the storm as pure enemy without the human decisions, staying for the grandmother, leaving the dog, that give the disaster its moral weight.
- Ending at landfall. The theme's real endings live weeks later, in blue tarps, generators and the first school day back.
An exercise
Write a poem in five short sections labelled only by hours, minus twelve, minus two, zero, the eye, plus one day, following a single household object, a porch chair, a photograph, a boat, through the storm. Let the object's fate carry all the emotion; keep the humans in the background.
A challenge
Write a hurricane poem whose middle stanza is the eye: syntactically calm, almost pastoral, with birds and blue sky, and make the reader dread the next stanza while nothing threatening is said. Then bring the wind back from the opposite direction, and change one important thing the first half established.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about a person whose name was also the hurricane's, and what it is like to hear your own name in every forecast, prayer and curse for a week.
Before you submit
- The eye or a deliberate still centre appears, placed for maximum dread.
- No fury-of-nature phrasing; force arrives through specific consequence.
- The storm's name is used meaningfully or deliberately withheld.
- Rhythm varies with the storm's phases.
- The ending reaches past landfall into recovery, memory or the marked calendar.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.