Under Stormy Skies

 

 

 

“There's always another storm. It's the way the world works. Snowstorms, rainstorms, windstorms, sandstorms, and firestorms. Some are fierce and others are small. You have to deal with each one separately, but you need to keep an eye on what’s brewing for tomorrow.” ― Maria V. Snyder, Fire Study

Storm Talk

Wind is a friend to the dying and the dead.
It moves them, rattling in their throats
on these dry milk pod days of drudgery.
It speaks in tongues of dry maple leaves
and in bony arms of autumn’s Boston ferns.
The blossoms, spread eagled in sun too long,
are blown to their beds, to lie in stillness
after rampage and ravaging.  This is windtalk.

Dusky skies weep rain like milk from skies breast
too full by death of a child, or children,
and sucked dry petals faltering in wet grasses
relinquish their hold and float muddily to marsh
where frogs cry for more, along with her.  This is raintalk.

Thunder echoes through canyon, like an angry husband
having found his daughter lying in the shadows,
basting her brown body where sun could see it
and use it, until she was nothing but wrinkles
and wry prickled dry hack of a cough.  He is raging
that she would to listen to anything but rock
as if it were god.  This is thundertalk.

Lightening is the forked tongue, silver-lipped sharp rebuke
that rasps against the cages of hidden things, this satanic sin
spewing a ton of heated messages that forges
words written by the angry fingertip of some god,
where a focused word is enough to curl toes
of cottonwood and burn invisible poems
across skim of the lake.  This is lighteningtalk.

 

©Carol Desjarlais 2007