The Thunder & After

Photo by Max LaRochelle on Unsplash

A crack of thunder over head A flash ’n’ crackle of lightning The gods say: Stretch your words across the sky Illuminate the stark, skeletal Trees of this northern winter.

Some poor sod’s dead Their rumble roar-not-fled Still echoing in my head Echo, reverberate, haunt Me instead.

All around my desperate head, Clouds drop frozen hail Like stones pelting down On a world turning hard, wet and lonely.

With a clown’s frown, On a world turning Down the chances offered by the gods The night sky wears a turned-down-frown, A clown’s painted-on smile, A curve of white grease paint, A mile wide, eight miles high, Definitely not heaven-sent, Splashed all across the black sky,

The moon offers respite, With its waxing and its waning, From interminable night; Light suffuses right through Us to the tightness of a beating heart Saturated, now, as the storm subsides: Satiated with blood and thunder Infecting these lonesome, English eyes With a lack of that mandatory fooling-disguise Which hides what is really always there: Souls trapped in this thinnest of air.

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