DARK SKY, SILVER LININGS
Strange, eerie beauty
Illuminating a surreal landscape,
A city shockingly transformed from twelve hours earlier.
Solid shafts of golden morning sunlight
Penetrating dense humid air.
Thick columns of brilliance
Piercing dark spaces
Between fallen fences and shattered buildings,
Revealing trees and telephone polls,
children's toys and garbage cans,
Insanely scattered
Across city roadways now paved with dirt.
Reminders of the tornado
That slashed across Kingsford last night
Like a mythical beast,
Howling thunderously and spitting lightning.
Yanking telephone polls out of the ground.
Ripping roofs from buildings,
Sending them spinning grotesquely across dark wet skies.
Smashing down trees,
Hurling them against homes and
Crushing automobiles,
Blocking roadways and
Making travel unthinkable.
Ripping garages from foundations and
Crashing them into houses,
Reducing them to kindling.
Sending sharp chunks of hail
Soaring across the ground
In blurry white horizontal streaks while
Flooding roadways and basements and
Beating down electrical power lines,
Near instantaneously
Casting the town into chaos and darkness.
A memory haunting and frightful.
But also, strangely,
Majestic,
Sensuous and spiritual.
.
Placing me into intimate contact
With core beliefs and primal emotions,
and also
With my own individual mortality.
Significant reminders,
Life lessons which constitute
Brilliant silver linings
In an otherwise very dark cloud.
-- Floyd Kucharski, Kingsford, Michigan.
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