Albert Pike

Lightning

The breath of the ocean my cradle is,
Which the sun draws up from the blue abyss,
And the upper cold gives it shape and form,
Till it peoples itself with living storm.

And when it has reached the upper air,
I hold its helm while it wanders there;
I lie in the shade of its lifted sail,
And my bark flies swift before the gale.

I coil myself like a quivering snake,
Invisible, on a chaotic lake;
And dwell unseen in the chasms of cloud,
And the vapors that even to earth are bowed.

I frown on the stars with my glittering eye,
And they hide away while the clouds go by;
And while my eye and shape are unseen,
The meteors down to my palace lean.

When my thin cradle is shaken by wind,
And moon and stars lag eyeless behind,
Then do I quiver, and thunders moan,
In their porphyry caves beneath my throne.

I look in the eyes of the winged stars,
And they whirl away in their orbal cars,
And hide afar in the deeps of heaven,
Like water-drops by the tempest driven.

I look on the sun, and he hideth under
The black plumes of my servant Thunder;
And the moon shuts down her silver lid
Over her eye by which tides are fed.

I take the shape of a fiery adder,
And gliding down the swinging ladder
Of cloud, I hiss on the ocean's breast,
And wake it in pain from its azure rest.

I take the form of an arrow of flame,
And pierce the clouds, and make darkness tame;
While the flap of Night's dark, drifting sail
Shakes to the earth the heavy hail.

I dash myself against granite rocks,
And the echoes rush abroad in flocks,
And each with his hoarse and rattling tongue
Hurls back the challenge that Thunder flung.

And often when heaven's cloudless floor
Is as brilliant and bright as the inmost core
Of an angel's snowy soul, I glide
From the lids of the west;—(thus the cheek of a bride

Blushes and burns when his step is heard —
And still my servant sleeps unstirred,
While the swift Sunset his broad wings shakes
Over horizon-hidden lakes.

And there, all night, I am seen to quiver,
And flash on the surface of Night's broad river,
Out of whose depths I come and go,
While my cradle of cloud is unseen below.

I inspire the earth, the air, the water,
I am parent of life and king of slaughter,
I green the earth, I open the flowers,
I paint them with blushes, and feed them with' showers.

I am the heart's ethereal essence,
All life existeth by my presence;
I am the soul of the mighty earth,
And give its myriad creatures birth.

I pierce to the heart of the sunken rocks,
And my fire awakens the earthquake shocks;
I am the life of the flowers and buds,
And feed them with air and vapor-floods.

I am eternal, yet change forever;
I wander always, and dissipate never;
Decay and waste no power possess
Over me, the deathless and fatherless.

Unelemental, immaterial,
Less gross than aught that is not ethereal;
And next to spirit in rank am I:
While matter exists I can never die.