The Tornado and Clara: two poems

The Tornado

You are a raging column 

of grey firmament,

a single serpentine finger

spiraling down to sweep the earth,

a razored mouth devouring,

chewing, spitting,

stripping

mothers of daughters,

fathers of sons,

leaving chains of crumbling homes

in broad, dead daylight.

Not one soul stands a chance

against the deafening rumble

of your twisting walls of wrath,

so clamorous 

that all sound 

cracks

like ancient, stone cities

being razed to the ground,

or like

the birth of a new world. 

Clara

She was the lover of a tyrant,

perhaps a beast herself,

but lying there, dead, in the open cold,

on her back, the concrete her last bed,

flesh riddled with gunfire, with swollen face

and a chest shredded, partially 

exposed for all kinds of mockery,

the soul of the world wept interminably:

that such crafted beauty was now lost

to the hands of foaming men,

a body never to be loved again.