May Storm
1 Minute Read Time
Assistant Editor Leila Chatti: A. J. Worley’s luminous sonnet “May Storm” turns a careful eye onto the quiet divinity that exists in our daily lives. In it, we follow the speaker into and through a world made new by an unseasonable snow storm—all encased in ice, chapel of the ordinary, before us, shining.
Listen to A. J. Worley read “May Storm”:
May Storm
We walk the pasture after a late snow,
the horses under pole-propped planks of tin,
your hand against the wind for mine within,
our ankles iced in springtime shoes cropped low.
We tread the husky globes of milkweed, blow
the filaments that float and hug our skin,
that stick to reeds as stiff as porcelain
raised high above the earth’s hard veil and glow.
Creation all in white. The altar’s luster
carried on the breath of heaven’s bluster;
murmurings of promised honey weather
echo through the roofless chapel’s mass.
A congregation of the wet, long grass,
now bowing—now rising together.
