The Cruellest Month

Childhood Storms

Summers of my childhood;
slow-motion, stinking Sydney days,
moving through the soupy air
in a thick film of sweat
or not moving but lolling
on the rippling verandah
where the breath comes
in slow beats
in the pulsing sub-tropical heat

until five or four pm,
the sky bruises purple,
and the southerly wind whips in
with the smell of carbon dioxide;
the ions are positive, and so
are you, as the jacaranda bells
and the frangianis fly

warning thunder rumbles
from afar, gorgeous percussion
for the lightshow that rends
the El Greco sky in five
you sit on the veranda
your front row seat
for nature's best theatre;

jagged silver tongues
and flashing forks;
random timpani,
simmering kettledrums;
and big fat raindrops
that plop like heavy pennies
in slow motion
with the odour of hot earth
reaching up to the rain.

An ecstatic climate change
that divided summer days
of my childhood,
but which visits no longer;
storms are more seldom,
the southerlies blocked
by city skyscrapers,
the thunder is duller,
its lightning mere flash.









April 14—thunder and lightning