The subtitle—”The whether or weather of my soul”—is a homophonic pun that announces the poem’s method: collapsing the philosophical (“whether” as doubt, decision, uncertainty) into the meteorological (“weather” as force, pattern, atmosphere). The opening catalog of inverted disasters is the poem’s engine and its most inventive passage. Each oxymoron—”cyclone of kindness,” “hurricane’s eye to wrap us in warmth,” “typhoon that stirs gentle thoughts,” “earthquake to gently wake us,” “landslide of calm,” “avalanche of love”—takes a destructive force and reimagines it as a vehicle for tenderness. The parenthetical “(Oh, I want to experience that one!)” after the avalanche of love is vintage Plahm: the poet breaking through his own conceit to confess genuine desire, the literary device interrupted by the human being. The middle section performs the poem’s crucial turn: the speaker’s own emotional life is itself a weather system—a tsunami, a wildfire—and the Muse’s gift is not to stop the storm but to modulate it. She brings “a soft breeze / that prevents chaos,” a “steady tide” that soothes the tsunami. The distinction is important: the Muse doesn’t eliminate the weather but redirects it, making the poet’s destructive intensity livable rather than lethal. The second cascade—”drizzle of dreams,” “monsoon of mercy,” “whirlwind of soft whispers,” “wildfire of rage / now tremors of tenderness”—mirrors the opening catalog but applies it specifically to the speaker’s inner landscape, showing how the Muse’s influence has already accomplished what the opening stanzas wished for. The pivot from rage to tenderness through the geological metaphor (wildfire → tremors) is precisely observed: tenderness doesn’t replace rage; it trembles in the same body, using the same seismic energy for a different purpose. The closing three lines—”bury me / in an avalanche / of love”—return to the opening catalog’s most desired item, but now as an imperative rather than a question. The poem begins by asking “Why isn’t there?” and ends by demanding it. The internal devil tamed by the Muse’s “tide from heaven” who “now writes— / poetry” is the poem’s origin story in miniature: the entire Honey Bee Bard project is what happens when a tsunami finds its steady tide.

A poem that finds genuine originality in a simple inversion—what if natural disasters were forces for good?—and sustains it with enough structural intelligence to make the conceit feel discovered rather than imposed. The opening catalog is the poem’s showpiece: each oxymoron (cyclone of kindness, hurricane of warmth, earthquake that gently wakes) creates a vivid, almost physical sensation of impossible tenderness at overwhelming scale, and the accumulation builds a world the reader wants to inhabit. The parenthetical outburst after “avalanche of love” is perfectly placed, breaking the pattern just when it might become predictable and reminding the reader that behind the conceit stands a man who is not merely playing with words but longing for what they describe. The poem’s structural arc—from wishing for benevolent disasters to recognizing the Muse already provides them—gives the piece genuine emotional progression rather than mere catalog. The distinction between eliminating the storm and redirecting it shows philosophical sophistication: the Muse doesn’t cure the poet’s intensity but gives it a channel, which is a far more honest account of how love works than the fairy-tale version. The second cascade (drizzle of dreams, monsoon of mercy) effectively mirrors and personalizes the first, and the wildfire-to-tremors transformation is the poem’s most precise image—the same energy, repurposed. The closing “bury me / in an avalanche / of love” earns its repetition by arriving as a command after beginning as a wish, demonstrating the emotional journey from longing to demand. Where the poem is less successful is in a few middle stanzas where the weather metaphors briefly lose their specificity—”My intensity— / a longing, / a natural yearning / for simplicity” is abstract where the surrounding stanzas are vivid—and the whether/weather pun in the subtitle, while clever, isn’t developed within the poem itself. But the central conceit is strong, the Muse’s role is freshly articulated, and the closing image of the devil tamed into poetry is a compact origin myth for the entire Honey Bee Bard enterprise. A poem that makes you wish for better storms.