Since the mid 2000s, I’ve more or less tried to avoid using poetry to process traumas and strong emotions. This decision was inspired by a friend and mentor who expressed open disdain for such poetry. I suppose, since I was still working through issues of neglect and abandonment from my childhood, I hoped this would his win his approval. But that’s another story.

I think that—slowly, dimly—I’m beginning to realize that for me using poetry to process personal traumas, experiences, and strong emotions is not only essential to my process of working through the deep stuff and eventually moving forward, but to my overall inspiration to produce new material. Now, where I’ve actively tried to resist urges to use poetry to process my traumas, I’m working to move in the other direction.

Of course, the storm is a metaphor for the emotional chaos stirred up by the diagnosis of cancer in a loved one. The outline in the storm adumbrated by flashes of light is metaphor for the image of the mass itself produced by scans—which basically use various kinds of flashes of light to produce the image, from X-rays to electromagnetism.

It’s been about two and a half years now since sitting in doctor’s offices with my wife going over scans and asking questions between long, strained attempts to breathe. And although my wife has been in remission for a couple of years at this point, I think it’s safe to say that I’m still traumatized by the experience of it all, hence this little bit of psychotherapeutic personal poetic trauma processing.