Tag: weather

Thunderstorm

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THE WIND begun to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low,—
He flung a menace at the earth,
A menace at the sky.

The leaves unhooked themselves from trees 5
And started all abroad;
The dust did scoop itself like hands
And throw away the road.

The wagons quickened on the streets,
The thunder hurried slow; 10
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.

The birds put up the bars to nests,
The cattle fled to barns;
There came one drop of giant rain, 15
And then, as if the hands

That held the dams had parted hold,
The waters wrecked the sky,
But overlooked my father’s house,
Just quartering a tree.

~Emily Dickinson

Okay, so not so much a Halloween poem, but there is definitely an element of the spooky and supernatural. It’s difficult to think about thunderstorms today–the sky is October blue, the sun pouring down as if to make up for the fact that it will be departing earlier tonight.

It’s definitely an autumn poem, too, with the leaves blowing from the trees. Everything in the poem is personified, from the wind to the leaves to the birds. All of nature is alive, inhabited, acting and reacting.

The poem ends with the quartering of a tree by lightning, and this does feel like a very Halloween-y image–the old cleft tree, scarred by storm. Though Dickinson does not describe the aftermath, the reader can see the tree, and this is the image with which she leaves us.

An awful tempest

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AN AWFUL tempest mashed the air,
The clouds were gaunt and few;
A black, as of a spectre’s cloak,
Hid heaven and earth from view.

The creatures chuckled on the roofs 5
And whistled in the air,
And shook their fists and gnashed their teeth,
And swung their frenzied hair.

The morning lit, the birds arose;
The monster’s faded eyes 10
Turned slowly to his native coast,
And peace was Paradise!

~Emily Dickinson

Your prompt: taking a cue from the Myth, describe a natural phenomenon in monstrous terms. Happy writing!

Storm

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It struck me every day
The lightning was as new
As if the cloud that instant slit
And let the fire through.

It burned me in the night, 5
It blistered in my dream;
It sickened fresh upon my sight
With every morning’s beam.

I thought that storm was brief,—
The maddest, quickest by; 10
But Nature lost the date of this,
And left it in the sky.

~Emily Dickinson
Image via pexels.com
https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-photography-of-boat-on-water-during-sunset-1118874/

I like this poem, but I’m not sure what to say about it, as my brain is pretty fried from a week of faculty meetings and prepping to teach five different courses starting this week, so I’m just going to leave this here for your enjoyment. Whatever your storms are, I hope they pass and are not left in the sky indefinitely.

Thunder

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

The farthest thunder that I heard
Was nearer than the sky,
And rumbles still, though torrid noons
Have lain their missiles by.
The lightning that preceded it
Struck no one but myself,
But I would not exchange the bolt
For all the rest of life.
Indebtedness to oxygen
The chemist may repay,
But not the obligation
To electricity.
It founds the homes and decks the days,
And every clamor bright
Is but the gleam concomitant
Of that waylaying light.
The thought is quiet as a flake,—
A crash without a sound;
How life’s reverberation
Its explanation found!

~Emily Dickinson

This seemed an appropriate poem for today, the day of July’s full moon. The July full moon is sometimes called the Buck Moon, for the bucks who are rubbing off their spring velvet in preparation for autumn. It’s also known as the Thunder Moon, for the summer storms that are prevalent during the month.

We’ve had some spectacular thunderstorms this season–the kind that split the air so that for an instant, nothing breathes. The kind that shake houses and trees to their foundations. In the instant that thunder first cleaves the sky, nothing else is possible, nothing else exists. The sound of it is one thing, the feeling another. When it rips through the clouds overhead, your breastbone shudders in your chest. It is so loud it is almost inaudible–like a giant too large for our eyes to take in.

Summer Storm

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There came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors As from an emerald ghost;
The doom’s electric moccason
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!

~Emily Dickinson

Storms here begin with a slight shift of the light, a fluttering at the margins of the day. First the wind rises, kindled before the approaching tempest. Pine boughs toss and nod to slim locusts and walnuts, polite at first, until their branches begin a frenzied tangle. The first few premature walnut leaves tear loose and fall like golden teardrops dashed away by an invisible hand. Distant harbingers of autumn, they are sobering in their brightness, shimmering reminders that all things come to an end.

But the storm is not truly imminent until the Alleghenies are lost behind a cloak of blue-grey, first blurring and then vanishing as if into legend. When the mountains disappear, and only then, is the onslaught inevitable. Then we batten down the hatches, dash for the laundry, and wait. Though, more often than not, there isn’t time to wait before the first few spattering drops, dashed sideways by the courier wind, cut sideways through the whirling air.

As I write, the rain has stopped blowing sideways and is falling almost straight down, thunder grumbling above and lightning just flashes barely illuminating the lowering clouds. Some time after the end of June, summer thunderstorms cease to have the look of downpours that bring rainbows and instead take on the tints of autumn, hints of long rainy days that fade seamlessly into lengthening nights. Every season comes hard on the heels of the one before and ties itself into knots with the next. Sometimes I think there are either no seasons, or three hundred sixty-five of them. Maybe even twenty-four seasons a day…

This rain falls on already damp red clay, on tomatoes and peppers that have had quite enough, thank you, on chickens who don’t seem to mind too much as long as it’s not a hurricane. The bees have tucked themselves away safely in their boxes. How dry and warm it must be inside, the air heavy with warmth and pollen and the hum of tens of thousands of wings.

Yesterday was a garden day, a yard day, a swimming pool day. A day to overdo the fresh air and sunshine, because really, such things cannot be overdone. Today is a day for tea and introspection, a day to draw back out of the elements and open a book of poetry.

Rain and not bees

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A drop fell on the apple tree
Another on the roof;
A half a dozen kissed the eaves,
And made the gables laugh.

A few went out to help the brook,
That went to help the sea.
Myself conjectured, Were they pearls,
What necklaces could be!

The dust replaced in hoisted roads,
The birds jocoser sung;
The sunshine threw his hat away,
The orchards spangles hung.

The breezes brought dejected lutes,
And bathed them in the glee;
The East put out a single flag,
And signed the fete away.

~Emily Dickinson

If we were having the kind of summer shower Dickinson is writing about, I would be picking up my bees today. No such luck. Bees, like other witches, do not appreciate getting wet. They get downright grouchy. When the barometer falls, otherwise lovely honeybees become Not Very Nice People.

So today, instead of picking up my bees, I am daydreaming of bees, reading Dickinson’s poems about or referencing bees, and wondering when this rain is going to end.

This is not a summer shower. This is a summer monsoon. It’s just not stopping. It’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow, too, so no bees until Tuesday.

I’ve waited two years. I guess I can wait a little longer.

Pneumonia weather

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XXVIII
I know a place where summer strives
With such a practised frost,
She each year leads her daisies back,
Recording briefly, “Lost.”


But when the south wind stirs the pools
And struggles in the lanes,
Her heart misgives her for her vow,
And she pours soft refrains


Into the lap of adamant,
And spices, and the dew,
That stiffens quietly to quartz,
Upon her amber shoe.

~Emily Dickinson

When I was a child, my mother called this “pneumonia weather.” The skies are clear blue, the sunlight warm–and yet there’s a lingering chill behind the glimmer, a reminder that winter hasn’t yet loosed its fingers completely. There will be days in the high seventies, even in the eighties. And there will be mornings when we wake to hard frost.

Only the hardiest blossoms survive this weather. Spring teases them from tight buds to tempt fate. Spring and autumn balance each other on either side of the wheel of the year in a way that summer and winter cannot. Summer and winter are opposites, but spring and autumn are nearly-identical twins. One is redheaded, one has locks of fern-green and forsythia–but they are like the same person seen coming and going.

In the Shenandoah Valley in winter, we exclaim over unseasonably warm days. We grumble about cold summer rains. But the wild swings in spring and autumn do not surprise us. There are a thousand seasons in each one–microseasons, shifting from one to the next as the sun arcs the sky. The daisies won’t arrive till full summer, but the snowy drifts of bloom lacing the apple branches take their chances. They are gamblers all. Maybe they will swell to fruit this summer. Or maybe they are only the ghosts of possibility, beads of quartz frost on amber shoes.