THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTNING

I can hear your whisper and distant mutter. I can smell your damp on the breeze and in the sky I see the halo of your violence. Storm I know you are coming.”

― Robert Fanney

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap:

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-

Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

 

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep

In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

 

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,

And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in,

Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

– Wind by Ted Hughes

At that instant a dazzling claw of lightning streaked down the length of the sky. The hedge and the distant trees seemed to leap forward in the brilliance of the flash. Immediately upon it came the thunder: a high, tearing noise, as though some huge thing were being ripped to pieces close above, which deepened and turned to enormous blows of dissolution. Then the rain fell like a waterfall. In a few seconds the ground was covered with water and over it, to a height of inches, rose a haze formed of a myriad minute splashes. Stupefied with the shock, unable even to move, the sodden rabbits crouched inert, almost pinned to the earth by the rain.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

Only one thing that you can see and hear that is beautiful and frightening at the same time, and that is a thunder storm.”

― R.K. Cowles