Aftermath - May 25 2021

 

Aftermath

May 25 2021

You can smell the smoke

where lightning hit the tree,

a ragged scar

of charred black bark

defacing the trunk.

And the frightened dogs

who cowered in the thunder

are still kind of jumpy

and hovering close.

The lights flicker

the sky darkens

a cold wind picks up.

I can feel the hair on my arms bristle,

as if my DNA

connected me to weather

in some atavistic way,

despite the distance we keep

from nature.

The atmosphere is charged

and I can feel the pent-up power,

the urgent need

for release.

And then, when it's done, the relief.

How, on a muggy summer day

a storm clears the air.

And leaves us feeling humble

and small.

At nature's indifference

and overwhelming power.

At the contingency of life,

whether by flash flood or blow-down

lightning or hail.

I take a deep breath

of the cool dry air.

There is a clarity to things

in this limpid light,

the grass greener

the sky a blue transparent lens.

And the smouldering tree

that by all rights should be dead

has survived,

its freshly rinsed leaves

incandescently bright.

We are on the periphery of a summer storm, as if it's flirting with us. I stepped outside, under a darkening sky in the swirling wind, and I could feel the excitement: the power of weather; the transgressive sense of danger; and the smugness of our illusion of safety. It made me want to write about a lightning storm, but I didn't want to simply describe it: too uninteresting and old-hat to the reader; too susceptible to cliché. So I thought I'd bracket it instead: the before and the after.

With generous poetic licence, of course! Because no lightning hit a tree. And because my dogs aren't fazed by anything.

I emailed the first draft of this poem to a friend. Here's part of how I introduced it. I'm including this because it succinctly describes what I'm often trying to do in my poetry, and therefore how I measure my success. And this poem is as good an example as any of how this works.

It betrays my usual tendency toward descriptive lyrical poetry.

So the challenge for me, in order to engage the reader and make his/her commitment worthwhile, is to make the poem both bigger and smaller than that: that is, to not only somehow personalize it and inject emotion, but to go from the small -- close observation and microcosm -- to the large -- some philosophical musing or greater truth.