Thunder & After

A crack of thunder over head
A flash 'n' crackle of lightning
The gods say::
Stretch your words across the sky
Illuminate the stark, skeletal
Trees of this northern winter.

Some poor sod's dead
Their rumble roar-not-fled
Still echoing in my head
Echo, reverberate, haunt.

All around my desperate head,
Clouds drop frozen hail
Like stones pelting down
On a world turning wet and lonely.

With a clown’s frown,
On a world turning
Down the chances offered by the gods
The night sky wears a turned-down-frown,
A clown’s painted-on smile,
A curve of white grease paint,
A mile wide, eight miles high,
Definitely not heaven-sent,
Splashed all across the black sky,

The moon offers respite,
With its waxing and its waning,
From interminable night;
Light suffuses right through
Us to the tightness of a beating heart
Saturated, now, as the storm subsides:
Satiated with  blood and thunder
Infecting these lonesome, English eyes
With a lack of that mandatory fooling-disguise
Which hides what is really always there:
Souls trapped in this thinnest of air.