Into the Storm

by David Stalling

When the sirens wail and the sky turns iron,
when the river forgets its name
and climbs the banks like a beast unchained,
I do not run.

I step forward.

While others shutter windows
and count the seconds between lightning and fear,
I count the heartbeats in my chest,
how they answer the thunder,
how they rise to meet it.

I have stood where mountains scrape the underbelly of storms,
where the air splits open in white veins of fire,
and the world trembles beneath its own voice.

I have lifted my face to the lightning and thunder,
not as a victim,
but as kin.

I have been where snow gives way without warning,
a roaring avalanche,
the mountain shedding its silence in a single breath.

I have felt the earth move with terrible intention,
and I did not curse it.
I listened.

I have watched a grizzly rise in a squall of muscle and dust,
a bluff charge breaking the air between us,
power incarnate,
fear given fur and teeth.

I have swum in an ocean convulsed by hurricane hands,
salt and fury thrashing at my ribs,
waves rising like dark cathedral walls.

Each crest a sermon.
Each undertow a question:
Will you yield?

And I have answered,
No.
I will join you.

Floodwaters have dragged me beneath tangled logjams,
wood and current conspiring to claim me.
In that suffocating churn,
where breath becomes memory
and memory becomes prayer.

I felt it,
the raw pulse of the world,
unfiltered and unashamed.

There is a power in surrender
that is not weakness.
There is a freedom in standing
where the sky is breaking apart
and refusing to shrink.

I do not chase destruction.
I chase truth,
the unvarnished, electric truth
that lives inside the roar of wind
and the crack of lightning.

Because in the heart of the storm
there is no pretense.
No small talk.
No walls.

Only energy.
Only presence.
Only the fierce reminder
that we are made of the same elements
that shake the mountains
and carve the valleys.

When the world rises wild and uncontained,
I rise with it.

Not to conquer.
Not to survive.
But to become,
for one trembling,
incandescent moment,

as boundless,
as dangerous,
as alive,
as the storm itself