Cyclone Of Death

The lightning flashes

and threatens, the

foam-fields hiss,

the sharp white

terrible mirth of

brute Nature.

Sea-Waves by Rabindranath Tagore was published exactly 100 years ago, but the great Bengali poet's subject is timeless. His April of cyclones, "blind forms of being," was this year's last day of April for Bangladesh. Twenty- foot walls of water. Demonic winds of crushing force. The horror left behind: 125,000 lives lost, and still counting. A world used to human-scale catastrophes -- plane crashes, say, that kill a few hundred at most -- cannot absorb the biblical dooms that visit Bangladesh. Straddling the conjoined mouths...