PAD Day 6: Poem for a Stormy Day

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) write a poem about a sound, and
(2) write a poem that looks at something in different ways or from different perspectives, like Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird".
So here is my somewhat autobiographical take on one of my least favorite sounds, thunder. And yes, as the last stanza suggests, we are expecting heavy storm here today.

10 Ways of Hearing a Thunderstorm

1.

The ancients had their gods

Like Zeus and Thor

who manufactured lightning bolts

and smote the undeserving.

Thunder was the sound of retribution.

2.

My grandmother used to tell me

that thunder was the angels bowling.

A rumble was a ball rolling down the lane

and a clap was the pins smashed by a strike.

3.

My mother said thunder was God

moving His furniture.

Once, after a particularly loud boom,

I said, “He must have dropped a sofa.”

4.

Despite her reassurances,

Mom would always pace the house

nervously during a thunderstorm,

especially at night, when she would

walk the hall in her white nightgown

like an agitated ghost.

5.

I can’t sleep through thunderstorms either.

At the first distant rumble, I’m awake,

and stay up till it’s well past.

Some people use recordings of storms

to help them relax and sleep.

I don’t get it.

6.

My dog used to cower under the bed

at the first loud thunderclap.

If I were small enough

I’d be there too.

7.

I studied the weather as a kid.

I wanted to be a meteorologist.

I learned that you could tell how close

the lightning was by counting the seconds

between the flash and the bang.

It only made me more nervous.

8.

Rolling thunder doesn’t bother me much

because I know it’s only cloud-to-cloud.

I can see it in the distance, actually beautiful,

the clouds flickering orange, white, or blue.

It’s cloud-to-ground, the bright white flash

and the house-shaking boom

that puts my nerves on edge.

9.

Once I watched a thundercloud

from a plane at 30,000 feet.

It looked so innocuous down there

like one of those old friction-spark toys

rolling across the earth

and I couldn’t hear a sound.

10.

Today I am minding

my two young granddaughters.

There are storms on the way.

I will bite my lip, push down my fear,

and tell them some myth about the thunder.

It’s just the clouds bumping together, I’ll say,

and the lightning’s from the sparks

when they collide.