Written November 2025
Prompt: Write a short poem that uses heavy figures of speech and metaphors in unusual ways.
Thinking it too calm a night
to leave the lonely villages desolate and
asleep, Nature stirs in heavenly slumber---a fright
to humankind ancient and unknown. Her soil-spun
tentacles slice air into loaves, like a butcher cleaving meat
or the blades of a mammoth turbine. Wispy feet
extend across fields and farms, a psychotic nighttime
perambulation where the footpath is all of human existence.
Nature’s scattered faces scream and bawl in eternal vengeance,
thousand-fold infant meltdowns caroming across the debris-streaked field,
now a bleak wheat cemetery screaming for mercy
while Nature’s temper drowns its own kind,
over
and
over
again
like a crazed sleepwalker.
Inspirations and Comments
As you may have noticed, this poem doesn’t follow a specific structure or format, like some of the other ones I’ve written. There isn’t really any rhyme scheme (although a few of the lines do near-rhyme in some way), and it doesn’t use any specific rhythm or meter. However, At Storm’s Beginning utilizes unusual figures of speech to make its message more interesting: the winds of a growing tornado become blades of a mammoth turbine, and a field of decimated wheat after a storm is now a bleak wheat cemetery screaming for mercy (notice the assonance with the bleak wheat).
The entire poem, in fact, is a metaphor for a large and tumultuous storm breaking over an open field. The storm is likened to Nature, which drowns its own kind, and the human species is portrayed as alien and distant in this poem. Near the end, I decided to try out something interesting with the division of lines, placing each word in “over and over again” on its own line for extra effect. I also used the technique of enjambment several times throughout this poem, where I end a sentence in the middle of a line and begin another one before that line ends.