Seven short lines, and the speaker has already fallen in love with a storm. "Thunder" is a poem of address: the speaker talks directly to the thunder, praises it, takes it into their body, and only in the last line admits it has gone. What begins as awe at a natural force ends as longing, and that shift is the poem's central idea. The speaker doesn't want safety or calm. They want the overwhelming thing back.
The senses are the first thing to notice. "I can see the lightning / I can feel the thunder." We might expect "hear," since thunder is the sound of a storm, but the speaker chooses "feel," and the choice matters. Anyone who has stood near a close strike knows that thunder is as much a pressure in the chest as a noise in the ears, and the poem keeps to that physical register. Line four then repeats line three and pushes it further: "Feel the thunder rushing through my veins." The first time, the thunder is something sensed. The second time, it has entered the speaker and become blood. The repetition works like a rumble that grows louder, and "rushing" carries the speed of a pulse and a flood at once. By this point the speaker is no longer watching the storm. They have become part of it.
The poem is built on repetition rather than rhyme. There is no end rhyme and no steady metre, so it reads as free verse, but the word "thunder" turns up seven times in seven lines, like a drum. The opening line, "Thunder, beautiful thunder," returns word for word as line five and frames the middle of the poem like a chorus. That gives it the feel of a song lyric, though that is an impression from the form, not a fact about how it was written. The line itself rolls well: two heavy "thun" beats with the lighter "beautiful" between them. There is also a quiet sound-link in "wonderful" (line six), which rhymes perfectly with "thunder." The wonder is already inside the storm's name, and the speaker simply hears it.
"You're the most wonderful catastrophe" is the poem's sharpest phrase. It is an oxymoron, pairing delight with disaster, and the speaker doesn't soften it. "Most" is absolute, and "catastrophe" is not a gentle word. It comes from a Greek word meaning an overturning, and being overturned is exactly what the speaker seems to enjoy. The poem never pretends the storm is harmless. It suggests that admiration and fear can be the same feeling, and that part of beauty is how much it threatens to overwhelm us.
The last line changes the poem. Until then everything is described in the present tense: I can see, I can feel. Then comes the only question in the poem, "when will you be coming back to me?" "Coming back" means the thunder has left, so the sensations in the earlier lines are either a memory or an aftershock the body is still carrying. The question also makes the address more intimate. "Back to me" is how one speaks to a person, not to weather. Judging by the imagery of veins and rushing blood, the thunder may stand for a lover or an intense experience, though the poem never says so. That openness is useful, because readers can supply their own storm.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. The vocabulary is plain: "beautiful," "wonderful," "feel." There is no elaborate metaphor, only a few repeated words and one well-placed turn. The poem also ends on a question and gives no answer, so the last impression is of a rumble fading in the distance and a speaker listening for it to return. It asks why we sometimes long for the very things that overturn us, and it does so in under thirty words of real content.
The poem comes with only the name bknrd1712 attached, and it asks to be read without a biography. It manages that well: the feeling is in the language, and the language is enough.