Rumbling right above, as brief bursts of light create an almost ethereal picture for only a fleeting moment, pictures that last for but an instant in the mind's eye.
Pictures of a strange scene, almost familiar, but different in the ghastly light. It becomes otherworldly, like a snapshot of some distant scene under some distant sun.
And then the rain follows. Sometimes soon, sometimes late, but it always comes. Erratic, uniform, suddenly, gradually, but it always comes.
The leaves shiver, the grass quakes. The storm reaches out and lets loose its fury. Or maybe it's sadness that falls upon the ground and trees and Earth. Maybe the clouds darken not from anger, but from sorrow. Perhaps the sky weeps during thunderstorms.
The storm calls to us, the poets, the writers. To the dreamers and the wishers, the ones who dare to imagine what comes with the rain. It reaches to us, asking us, begging us to imagine it, to recreate it in our words, in our ideas, in our thoughts.
But it ends. As fleeting as the lightning flash, the storm disappears. The memory becomes distant, and the foreign scenes and ideas fade away too.
To sit in the middle of a storm, as the lightning cracks and the trees shake, as the rain pounds the pavement and the ground shakes from deep, rolling thunder. To sit there among the fury, the sadness, of the storm is to sit among the loneliest of us all.