Tornados & Dragons

All the green night long we sat there
while the storm surged on, the dog whimpering,
and the cat under the couch, both watching
as slivers of dragon light etched the sky;
she was on her knees in the bedroom,
one candle by the bedside table,
she kept whispering as if God above
must be dead else the devil’s angels
were raising hell in the fields
outside her window; and, I
was just as curious as she
to the disturbance absconding
with our peace of mind; there came
a moment when I thought I’d seen
an eye, a green flick wink upon the fire,
and in my imagination I could see the tail
of a mighty beast, a great dragon wing
flapping red on green, until the sky lit up
and all the sky fell down in white slips
of ice and fire; and I stood there gazing
into that eye of power; and, to this day
I think it lived; yet, as we know the mind
plays tricks in the mist and hail,
and such things as play us in our waking thought
disperse in sun’s clear idea of sight,
and what we found was a tornado gash
among the rows of hay and cotton; the beast
had crawled along the valley like a black angel
or dragon, dipping down and burning, whirling,
plucking row after row of white puffs into the sky,
where we discovered them like children on a playground
lodged on the empty red barn, pressed white against red
as if the bladed sky had marked this spot as its sovereignty.

 – Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.