Old man stands alone,
shirt undone,
hair silver and lifting,
the sky begins to split.
The storm enters
not with cruelty,
but with memory,
that deep breath before
the world unbuttons itself.
Thunder cracks like bones once young.
The rain walks sideways,
then vertical,
then all directions.
He does not move.
Was the storm that raised him,
not his father,
not a stiff lipped god behind a pulpit,
but this:
a violent choir of wind and water
tearing through the trees like language
he always understood
but never spoke.
Remembering it in his legs,
how the wind,
long ago,
swept him off roofs,
out of dry judgement,
into open roads and beds and truths.
How lightning never hit him,
but always pointed
and directed.
He once chased it,
barefoot,
drunk on youth and refusal,
beautiful clouds, black and blooming.
giving permission
to crack open,
shake the dullness off the skin
like the last coat of sleep.
Now, old and alone,
he feels it again,
that holy silence between the strikes,
that rush of air through the ribs,
the kind that makes love and sin feel small.
The wind doesn’t ask where he’s been.
The rain doesn’t question strength.
They just take him in,
pulling his bones into a long, level song.
No one watching.
No one shouting him back inside.
Only black clouds
reaching low enough
to press their foreheads to his.
In that communion,
the unspoken pact between man and squall
he closes his eyes,
and lets go
of names, of time, of answers.
Only the storm
knows who he was.
Only the storm
still loves him for it.