By Charles M. Sumid Copyright 2025 Written 1977

North winds gather
over water no one watches

The lake has no boats today,
no fishermen to hurry home

Just water meeting sky in privacy

First thunder rolls across thirty miles of surface
Each wave builds precisely,
follows laws written in the planet’s first waters

Lightning writes its brief script on darkness
No one reads these bright verbs,
these electric assertions

The storm holds nothing back
not because someone might see,
but because storms arrive whole,
spend everything,
move on

Rain falls in sheets, in walls,
in architectures of water
Each drop finds its place
in patterns no one charts

Waves build higher now,
white-capped and formal
in their fury

They crash on empty shores
with the same violence
they’d bring to crowded beaches

The storm’s mathematics work out perfectly:
pressure gradients, wind velocities,
electrical potential seeking ground

Beauty is incidental to these calculations

At the storm’s center,
a column of absolute stillness
The eye that sees nothing,
needs no witness

For three hours the lake endures
this magnificent assault

Trees on distant shores bend,
break, or hold
No one keeps score

After (and there is always after)
the water remembers its level
Waves diminish by precise degrees

What lightning split,
darkness mends

Morning will find branches on new shores,
patterns in sand no one will see
before the next wind erases them

But tonight, in this unwitnessed hour,
the storm was absolute
Every electron discharged,
every wave at its full height,
every sound at its true volume

Nothing held back for show,
nothing diminished by solitude

Just weather being weather,
thorough as gravity,
alone as mathematics,
exact in its passing