When Lightning Walks by Steven Croft
Across the top of the world
an unknown, mystical experience
of boom and flash in the white
realm of reindeer herders
What if this strange rupture
of sky spreads like a horrible fault
like fires known only to the south
moving all the way north like
the water clock of melting ice
Flowing down like a mad wind
blowing a demonic song all
over the whole world singing
of diminishing harvests sea rise
refugees a growing maelstrom
That will rip the green coat
of the native earth to tatters
making broken toothpick towns
of our civilization casting them
Over the land like divination,
What if?
An Army veteran, Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. He has published two chapbooks, Coastal Scenes and Moment and Time, and has recent work in Willawaw Journal, Sky Island Journal, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Third Wednesday, Ariel Chart, San Pedro River Review, Poets Reading the News, Gyroscope Review, and other places.