i can write
homage
after
ode
after
poem
to my favorite weather event
but it remains just that
‘a weather event’
but i view thunderstorms
as something so much more—

when i was 12 or so,
somewhere around the time
you still believe in magic
but are old enough to know
you shouldn’t,
i held a conversation with a thunderstorm
and i feel like it was one of the last moments
i truly suspended
my disbelief.
i went in knowing it probably wasn’t real
but i decided
that for the duration of the thunderstorm
every boom
was an answer
to a question
and i’d know in my heart
what that answer meant.
and i sat on my porch
and held conference
with the storm
for the entirety
of its travel
over us
and i’ll never forget
that thunderstorm
(and with what little i understand
about weather
it seems entirely plausible to me
that every thunderstorm
is the same thunderstorm
coming back to check on
the one child
who ever showed interest
in its
dreams
and
nightmares.)

and that
is just one reason
out of multitudes
of why
i love thunderstorms
so much.