Mother Earth
Aug 25 2014


On the cusp of lightning
you can feel the charge
building up, and up.

Like a mile-high dam

about to fail,

shuddering

with uncontainable pressure.

Every molecule, on edge,

scalp tingling

hair on-end.

The acrid smell

of ionized air,

so your nose quivers

nostrils flare.

So when that jagged bolt
illuminates the earth
like a brilliant blue-white strobe
you're flat on your back,
limbs, spastic

brain, sparking madly.
The image, frozen in its flash.
And the sky, cracked by thunderclaps
you never heard.

Lightning does strike twice,
the same high ground
same sultry July.

And travels up, according to science.
Not whimsical gods, in drunken revelry,
hurtling down random death
from their heavenly perch.
But erupting
from under your feet.

Solid ground
feeling suddenly treacherous.
And wondering ...
can mother earth
ever be trusted again?


There was a story in the local news today about an amateur photographer who, while photographing the sky during an electrical storm, was stuck by lightning -- fortunately, just a glancing blow.

My immediate thought is how complacent we become. If lightning wasn't commonplace, and deaths so infrequent, it would be utterly terrifying: something with the force of atomic bombs, going off every few seconds, randomly touching down.

I also thought of a few misconceptions: that it starts in the sky and travels down; that lightning itself is silent; and that it never strikes twice. Lightning actually travels up. And if it's close enough -- as in the case of our unfortunate photographer -- not silent at all. And it's more likely than not to strike in the exact same spot: the conditions that made it strike the first time haven't changed, so why not a second? It becomes more a case of probability that utter randomness.

I wanted to make an analogy with an earthquake: how the ground shaking, the ground opening and swallowing-up, contradicts all our illusions about permanence. How it must ever afterward feel as if even the ground cannot be relied upon, mother earth can no longer trusted. I tried hard; but the whole earthquake thing seemed shoe-horned in and out-of-place, so I let it go.

I've written a lot of lightning poems. Although not at all recently. Not that I haven't been tempted, since electrical storms are really fun to write about, and contain all sorts of possibility: about death, randomness, complacency, beauty, and power; about the magnificence of nature and the insignificance of man. But I felt I'd already said more than enough, and would be pretty much just plagiarizing myself from here on in. I think I let this one slip by because it has a slightly different take. And because it's been awhile, so the subject seems fresher. And because ideas can be hard to come by, so there are days when I'm happy to come up with anything at all!