Stormlight
Rain-giver, hail-maker, tornado-farmer,
May's black hammer mesocyclone bouquet
falls into the world;
a twist and wrench
of chaos-stacked air that knows
only one gamble,
hanging its fate,
its otherworld gate
over wheatfields and wiseacres
it will strip down to skin
in a boiling of sky,
where one will be wrecked
and another spared
by the luck
of the drawing wind.
After the storm,
the crash gasp flash drama,
light is softened,
sky-wrapped in puff-clouds
like a newborn in crochet.
Trees stir and push
to their wild/calm lover.
Birds streak back in sepia
down to a world
neither colored
nor monochrome.
We ride these last days
between daggers,
between fear and relief,
between the holy
and the unholy,
the quick and the dead
watching domestic
disputes of drunk giants
from a mousehole of hope.
May 2022
posted for earthweal's
Mesocyclone: A storm-scale region of
rotation, typically around 2-6 miles in diameter and often found in the
right rear flank of a supercell (or often on the eastern, or front,
flank of a High Pressure storm). The circulation of a mesocyclone covers an area
much larger than the tornado that may develop within it. Properly used,
mesocyclone is a radar term; it is defined as a rotation signature
appearing on Doppler radar that meets specific criteria for magnitude,
vertical depth, and duration.~NOAA Weather
Images: Binger, Oklahoma F4 tornado of 22 May 1981. Courtesy of National Severe Storms Laboratory, NOAA Public Domain via wikimedia commons
Stormlight, May 2, 2022 ©joyannjones
