Today is my sixteenth day in Carolina.
It is also
the sixteenth day of thunder.
Do you know what it’s like to hear thunder down south?
* A resounding noise produced by the explosive expansion of air *
It comes even on sunny days
On unexpected days
On grey and green and wet days
And this time: it comes everyday.
I hear this sound and my wild impulses ignite.
Surge.
The need to call up a storm.
On these days I find myself fighting:
even gravity.
Don’t feed me a physical law of withholding,
I am on an insatiable journey.
My feet belong to more than the surface sixty-seven inches below me.
LET ME FIND THE REST.
* Humidity often causes excessive thirst *
With the thunder there is lightening.
Sometimes, we never see the rain.
But everyday I’ve seen a spark.
Do you know what it’s to see heat lightning?
A distant flash in the sky.
Not a sinlge bolt
Not a finger streak
But an area of clouds
Simultaneously: igniting.
When the heat lightning comes, there is no sound.
These flashes are warnings of far away storms,
And though the light reaches you
Its voice is a mystery
The shape of her hands has yet to be revealed.
Instead, our sky alights in silence.
And we wait for the answer
And the source
To come at once.
1 comment:
The best lightening storms I ever recall where in Wyoming. Perhaps my least favorite state of them all, but still it produces some incredible light shows. Heat lightening has some remarkable quality about it that cannot be reproduced by a Van de Graff or with raindrops.
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