High Desert Storm

Ominous clouds
Billow
Over a parched desert
Forked lightening cracks open
The slate gray sky
As a hollow clap of thunder
Like the boom of the kettle drum
Summersaults
Over Taos Mountain
Pinon scented breezes pirouette
In the dark sagebrush
Marbles of rain splat
And erupt into tiny red craters.
The fiery sun
Now low in the eastern sky
Slips from behind the clouds
Igniting an inferno
Backlighting the storm
In florescent day-glow flames
Intensified by gauzy sheets of rain.
Hundreds of miles to the east
Fast flying flexible ropes of lightening
Transport ten thousand ions
Across the charged sky.
East, west
North, south
Heaven and hell all put together.
The lights of Mable Dodge
Stoic behind barbed wire.

August 13, 2010
Ruth Lizotte