Wind-Colors

a sonnet after a storm

It is decidedly summer here now. Today is hot and sunny, but recently the tail-end of tropical storm Cristobal moved through. We received far less damage than predicted, and less than might have been expected from a storm that wreaked havoc through the tropics.

Here, we had little enough rain and no hail. But the winds were strong, coming before the rest of the storm and outlasting it as well. Pulsing, straight, hard winds, they came up all the way from the Gulf of Mexico—indeed, had originated in the Gulf of Campeche—to eventually spend their force on woodlands and prairies far from the oceans that formed them.

This poem tells about the colors that they created across the hillsides as they passed.

Wind-Colors

The passing of the clouds across the sky,
The shadow and the sunlight, blue and white
And gray, the billowed heavens dull, then bright—
The lights and shades are born and drift and die.

The passing of the gold upon the hill,
The flowered grasses, graceful, bend and rise,
Unending dance beneath the summer skies,
Great golden shimmer while the winds blow still.

Still blowing, breath of distant storm, awake
With life and color of the breathing day,
Your heartbeat in each moment’s change of hue,
The stems of grass that pause to curve and shake,
The clouds that swell, the trees that bow and sway
Instinct with silver storm winds passing through.