Elegy to a Storm | Danny Andrews

Diamonds crash down to the water’s surface

Splintering in twinkling shards across the rippling plane.

A night sky, blossoming and wilting

As mallards glide across the abyss, unperturbed.

Ships flee the sky’s great outcry,

families take flight for cover,

Children look with innocent wonder while

Mournful parents shield their eyes

Protecting these unsullied pearls from the fatal truth;

The elegy of a weeping world unfurling on the sky and sea before them.

Yet the swan floats atop this anguish with ease,

And looks across the flowering mists to the flourishing trees

Whose swaying branches act as bastion and bulwark,

Glutting on this mournful song and growing ever richer in their luscious beauty.

Giving shade to the sleeping doe

And rest to the flock that twitters with delight

And fills the gloom to sing the praises

Of the rejuvenating storm that quenches thirst

And drowns desire in the same glacial deluge.

I drink it in, the green and midnight blue of petrichor,

The cool sting of the droplets hitting my skin,

The sounds of the flurrying stars igniting against the waters,

A thousand tiny beacons, burning with a resolute fury,

That chokes on itself and falls into silence in the same instance.

My own stars join them, ignite in the churning storm before me.

But they are not scions of the woe that nature

weaves in the torrent and the thunder.

Nor do they come from the grief of my own troubles,

forgotten in the tapestry of wind and water.

No, these gentle celestials that flow

So delicately etching their way across my sullen face,

Are a tribute to the swan and swallows,

The trunks standing sentinel, the glittering lake,

To all blooming flowers that take root

In the soil of human malice.

A supplication to the beckoning sky,

Whose soft embrace is safe passage from sorrow

The Apotheosis to that realm where stretches out

verdant pastures of deep blue grass.

Purple trees swaying under a burning orange sky,

Where the nightingale croaks to the melodising toad,

And the warmth of human kindness triumphs

And finds solace from the violence of desperate, frail wrath.

Author’s Note:

This poem is a bit of a love letter to the poetry of Keats, which has enamoured me over these past two years with its rich language and constant shifts between the darkest and brightest moments of human experience. I was heavily inspired by him as I wrote it, though I also was exploring the synesthetic language of Baudelaire’s rich collection, The Flowers of Evil (for which there is a not so subtle allusion to in the last stanza), and wanted to use more of that, along with the hyperreal colours that are so freely explored in modernist landscapes to convey the transcendence beyond the material at the end of the poem.

I don’t know how successful any of these explorations have been, but it’s been interesting to try them out, and nice to give a last tribute to the Rose, which I’ve enjoyed writing for immensely over the past two years.