Strength Against the Storm: Finding Community and Love in Smith’s Poetry

Patricia Smith, winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry, empowers communities to hold on tight to each other and nature.

“The Awakening” hails from The Intentions of Thunder by Patricia Smith, her newest collection and recent winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry. A longtime poet, Smith expertly tackles an intense and vast range of topics, mastering lyrical description and surprising persona shifts. This poem in particular observes a tree, bracing against the stormy weather.

Through five-line stanzas, she guides the reader through a back-and-forth war between tree and weather. While it may be odd to see a nature versus nature plot, the personification of the tree (“spindly fingers,” “curls her toes”) encourages readers to identify and sympathize with “her” struggle.

The relentless storm does not hold back in controlling almost all of nature’s powers. It forces wind and water to roar at her, causing her to splinter, bend, strain, and ache. Yet she, the tree, “strains toward the sun” for “unlikely solace.” Once the sun, or “he,” finally hits the tree with heat, the storm recedes into a quiet, single-line whisper: “tomorrow.”

The usage of gendered pronouns and her reaching for love suggests an intimate connection between tree and sun. Although “tomorrow” could be both a promise of another day or a foreshadowing of a stormy future, Smith suggests a worthwhile appreciation for nature’s resilience. The tree symbolizes strength against that which threatens to tear her down. The love shared between tree and sun acts as a reward or blessing for the struggles she faces in persevering through stormy weather.

The most potent part appears in the finale of this dramatic tale: the stanza of recollecting the tree’s memories. When “She remembers lovers who / stop to scratch hopeful names into her skin,” it offers a sense of optimism if we turn to love and sympathize with each other.

The poem embraces community (in her scenario, Chicago) and the strength of holding onto each other in difficult times. It aligns with Schiller’s own mission to work together towards environmental justice: intersecting constantly between disciplines, contributing to international conferences, and working for and with diverse communities to bring everyone together in bracing against the uncertainty of thunder.

The Awakening

Since mother morning wiped clean
the chaotic slate of starlight, a hard wind
has forced the tree to beg. She bends
and splinters, bracing against the push,
her spindly fingers cramped in stretch

toward unlikely solace. All of her strains
toward the sun, which is now just a pulse
in the lightening sky, without the strength
to poke its teasing slivers of light through
the gray cloak of cloud. To move minutes,

she curls her toes into ribbons of soil.
Her skin grows wet. The lake roars in, chilling
her thick ankle, and she whistles ache
toward the skyline’s bright confusion
of gray and glass. The waking sun chuckles

low in his throat as the tree’s fingers freeze
and crack. Then he suddenly smacks one
of her dew-slick sides with heat. Jolted to
her toes, the tree succumbs to incessant love
as the lake recedes and the wind whispers

tomorrow.

The tree stands taller, breathes in melody,
the blessings of sun. She remembers many
things, not just the bodies flat against her,
seeking shade. She remembers lovers who
stop to scratch hopeful names into her skin.
She remembers geography’s uncertain rain.
And she has a name for the moan that worries
gently in her hair.
It is called Chicago.