Saturday, June 7, 2014

Lightning and Hail in Carolina

lightning copa 8pm

The TV screen explodes in midnight dark;
High-tech lightning cuts football sleep;
You shift and dream of games in Illinois,
Should we fully wake to news and portents
Of undeniable weather--the satellite report,
Will it ever rain out here on desert land?

Weather was childhood's chief excitement
Turning porch chairs to makeshift fort
Against the blowing spray, huddling
In cramped and sweltering happiness
While Papa paced the boards triumphant
That cataracts had not wholly dimmed his sight:
Watching for a third strike to the Ashcraft house
Across the street, enraged by Nature's mean
Caprice, wanting to believe our Baptist God,
As well as he, loved his neighbor, his friend.

These stormy freaks of lightning
Struck him in the pit of inherited faith,
Who thought the sparrow's fall was meant
To keep us safe, to keep us all.

Another springtime storm, I found
Myself at home in the upstairs hall
While hail as white as big and white as ping pong balls
Crashed windows down like heavenly rocks,
The family all but one gone to church
To wail against the death of our dear cousin,
Was I thought too young or delicate to mourn?

Drawn back to the wall, I watched the monster hail
Pound and bounce like cannon balls on tin
And liked the strangeness of unleashed furies,
Liked how it felt to have the house in my command
The pagan simplicity of owning up to fright,
I'd read my Junior Classics and wondered what I'd done
For Zeus to loose his bolts upon my twice watered head.

When drenched and chastened mourners returned
Our lawn was like a driving range
And in the chicken yards
All over town, the wondering hens
Gave thought to the frozen biddies they might claim.

[Photo by Dylan Fogarty-MacDonald. Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]