Shelter in a storm...

Lightning splashes across
the skin of your closed night eyes
like high beams, instamatic,
from a dream car passing in the street…

a premonition before thunder
breaks the roof of your home

wide open to what really is.

Your children cry out in fear,
and you close all the windows,
to the wet incense of the storm,
in a mad rush like a pioneer.

It seems only minutes until
the city too has been forced
to wake up to itself: sirens, rain,
thoughts of broken lines, fallen
trees, old people dying, a journey
taken by glassy wet speculation,
the entire aquarium of the heart
swimming up into your head.

You pat down the baby girl. ‘Rain
daddy,’ she says. ‘Yes it’s nice,’
you reply, a shaman
of sweet simplicities.

Your wife goes, lays with the boy,
your son, who pointed to the lightning
as if the Bible were opening by itself
somewhere way above his gentle mind.

Now it is only the rain that is left,
a guttering music that smells like silver
and the sound of trees accepting the wind.

The family has returned itself to bed,
skin to skin, and that breathing deep sleep
of children you can practically taste,
shelter in a storm, shelter in a storm, shelter in a storm…

- Mark Mordue