Thursday, September 8, 2011


LIGHTNING STORM IN THE MORNING

Lightning storm in the morning
upstages the dawn.
Snake flash.
A flickering tongue of light.
And then the walking thunder
of a rolling barrage
in the no man’s land
between the trenches and Vimy Ridge.
The leaves a darker more frenzied green.
The rains whips the windowpanes
like the eyes of a shell-shocked horse
up to its chest in mud and blood.
Hysterical alarms sound off
like a squad car full of thieves
pleading their innocence like church bells.
The dripping patter of small arms fire
from snipers in the eaves.
Perth and Pearl Harbour
bombed by the Japanese on a Sunday
but it’s still too early to tell
until the lights go back on
and the dawn gets over the trauma
whether it’s a day of infamy of not.
Lightning rods with heroic nerves of copper
lord it over the weathervanes
who lost their heads
when the weather turned round
for running the lightning to ground
and saving the barn like an ark
in a deluge of water and fire
from drowning or burning down.
And the fire hydrants on Foster Street
feel ashamed of themselves
for being so stalwart and useless
in the face of a pre-emptive emergency.
And the flower barrels
are pulling their dishevelled hair out
like petunias that didn’t see it coming.
The air flinches
as if it had just been grasped
by the karmic revelation
of an avenging ghost.
God’s trying to kill a sinner.
Everyone listens to an inner voice
like the numbers of a lottery
to see if the dice
turned up snake-eyes
or lightning struck the jackpot.
The storm rolls over the horizon
like the rim of a Tim Horton’s coffee-cup
that reads like the happy aftermath
of the last man standing
under a tree in an open field
to get out of the rain.
Please try again.

PATRICK WHITE

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