Video: Cloudy with a chance of poetry

University Photographer/Videographer Dan Moore captured this timelapse of storm clouds overhead last week, and Associate Professor and Assessment Coordinator Valerie Pilmaier Murrenus (English and Women’s and Gender Studies) suggested Emily Dickinson for apt poetic words to accompany it. Enjoy.

“A Thunderstorm”

by Emily Dickinson

The wind begun to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low, –
He flung a menace at the earth,
A menace at the sky.

The leaves unhooked themselves from trees
And started all abroad;
The dust did scoop itself like hands
And throw away the road.

The wagons quickened on the streets,
The thunder hurried slow;
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.

The birds put up the bars to nests,
The cattle fled to barns;
There came one drop of giant rain,
And then, as if the hands

That held the dams had parted hold,
The waters wrecked the sky,
But overlooked my father’s house,
Just quartering a tree.