Summer Storm

At seventy miles an hour

They sped down the highway

Wind whipping back desultory talk.

Green slid by – trees and farms and meadows,

With odd punctuation of a one-light town.

He fixed the centre line.

She sighed, and stared across the fields

To count dilapidated barns.

Smoky blue chicory veiled the ditches

Fed by tongues of fire lily stalks.

Dark-eyed daisies preened their sightless faces

Challenging the torpid sun to burn

Golden as they.

‘Are you listening to me?’

The fields blurred.

She turned to him.

He drove intensely,

With jittery fingers and a wary smile.

‘Yes, of course.’

She drew herself back into the confines of the car

And focussed only on him.

In the blackness of the pre-dawn

The wind gusted violently.

The old house shuddered up its joints

From the cellar,

Groaning.

Lightening sliced the roiling sky;

Thunder exploded,

Wrenching at the windows.

Through blank panes stiletto shadows

From the thrashing trees

Bounded down the bleak corridors

Like goblins seeking sin.

Uneasy

She edged away from his satiety

And shrank into the tangled sheets,

Afraid of the noise

And perhaps the wrath of God.

In the morning birdsong fluted the air

Heady with the breath of wild herbs.

As she lingered down the sodden path

Lilies in the tall grass reached for her eagerly.

She sighed, and caressed a silken petal.

But he was revving the engine;

She hurried, tangling her feet in wiry roots.

The brown-eyed daisies never saw a thing.

Cynthia Buell Thomas