Wright's Writing

                             The Storm

 

The earth is black. Sky-waterfalls have drowned

The day, so that it’s night already. Night...

Cascading roars self-tumble down the night,

The rolling echoes of cloud-timpani

Careering through the dark, like massive mold-

Besotted logs that thunder down a hill

Unstoppably. They quake the earth. It shakes.

Its shivers, friendless in the deluge, are

Illumined by the sky’s electric rage:—

The lightning-bullets penetrate the mud!

They splash the night a bluish glare and then

Are gone, as if to prove that ghosts exist.

The sudden frozen sky-dividing flare,

Night’s guillotine—scaffold-skeletal—

Is echoed in the boom that cracks, ruptures

The caul of Chaos, all birth-bloody and hideous.

A branch smashes a window somewhere near,

Wind-torn from its old socket in a tree—

Or maybe lightning-severed. The telephone-line

Outside explodes in sparks, thus cutting off 

Communication and reducing life 

To huddled silence dimly candle-lit.

Cowering in the corner, far from windows,

And cringing when the cannons overhead

Let loose their rounds. There is no sleep tonight.