Poem: 'Tornado Warning'

 by Dawn S

So this is how it ends,

grey sea morphing into grey sky, horizon

a thin balance beam today, white ice sun rays

skirting behind clouds & there is the tornado,

does anybody know what it is? 

We’ll be standing on greyscale pebbles

bunched together, a row of fading trainers drained 

of light. I think your face will be too gaunt

to laugh or otherwise you would, the irony of it, 

really, because at the hospital they scooped

you into tubes and tapped out your life

on a screen, moulded your soul back together 

until you were well & now there is

this. What actually is it, though? It’s all 

I can think and if I asked myself as a six-year-old

she would know, or she’d believe she knew — God,

at least it is me and not her, or she’d be frozen

skeletal to the bed whispering

her final confessions into the night & hoping

the wind is strong enough to carry her

to heaven. She thought in heaven they slept

in purple sleeping bags. Anyway, 

now I see it, column-vortex choreography

spinning and spouting between sky and sea

like a Grecian pillar holding up the heavens. I remember

you telling me what a frieze was aged six,

and it is us and it is Pompeii and it is silent suspension 

& probably I should be worried about 

pyroclastic flow but I am giddy 

and I think if we were filming this

we’d laugh years later.

I suppose we still could. It is only

a warning. The shape of it

is always something that has pulled the soles

from my feet. Let us stand here, in a line,

with no tornado, so that perhaps when the day comes

this is the frieze we will be locked in, & please

sit me down and tell me how it functions

before the day it kills us in our sleep.

A version of this poem was originally published in The Malu Zine