In Thunderstorm, Nora Brennan recalls a July afternoon when blackened clouds and celestial clamor drove her family to prayer. Amid the fear of lightning, the moment's heart is found in a child's head resting against her mother-sheltered in love beneath a charged sky.
It wasn’t that the sky split open
above our heads or half the variegated
laurel bush in the lawn turned black
that July afternoon, shades of Golgotha
on the horizon, the still, heavy air interrupted
when wild animals, loose in heaven,
trampled the blackened clouds,
my father, back early from the fields--
an ominous sign in itself on a July afternoon--
joining us in the dining room to begin
a long litany of prayers; my mother, hearing
loud rumbles, a clash of horns, interrupting
Hail Marys to plead with God not to pierce
the house with crooked forks or incinerate
the electricity transformer in the Orchard Field
but that I was kneeling next to her,
my head resting on her heart, she
with her arm around me, drawing me close.