Most accounts of a tornado keep their eyes on the sky. Brianna Nichelle Colgan's "Tornado" spends thirteen of its fourteen lines there, then turns in the last one to a person. The poem follows a speaker from the first change in the air, through the funnel, the sirens and the shelter, to the moment the danger passes. Only then does it say what mattered all along: "how much I would have missed you if you weren't here anymore." The storm is the subject, but the poem is really about what a storm makes you realise.
The construction is plain and deliberate. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are long, uneven and loosely joined by commas, so they read like someone talking quickly, with no pause to polish anything. The poem opens with a run of sensory phrases: "The feel of the air," "The sight of a funnel," "Watching the funnel increase." Then it repeats a pattern of "I could feel," "I heard," "I could hear." These repeated verbs make the speaker a witness, and they pile up the way the danger does. Touch, sight and sound arrive one after another until the whole body is taking in the storm.
The early lines name feelings directly, with words like "intense," "astonishing" and "terrifying." Once the speaker is in motion, the language becomes more physical. "Faster and faster" imitates acceleration in its own repetition. The most memorable image is the comparison of the wind to "waking side by side with a moving train." The word "waking" is almost certainly a slip for "walking," and the image works either way. A train is an ordinary, familiar thing, and picturing yourself beside one at full speed gives a reader a measure of the force, the noise and the pull. Another apparent slip, "thugs" for "things," is an accident that happens to fit. A sound of something "flinging thugs around" suggests violence with intent, even if the word wasn't meant that way.
The poem's pacing is worth watching. Once the speaker is in the basement, the verbs are about watching and waiting: "I was watching the roof over my basement start to sink in towards us." "Sink" is slow and almost gentle, and that makes it more frightening than a word like "burst" would be. The danger is a ceiling lowering, with nothing the speaker can do about it. The pronoun changes here too. The poem has been full of "I" until "towards us" and "as we sat." The speaker was not alone, and this is the first sign of the "you" who arrives at the end. That is an inference from the text, but the poem sets it up carefully.
Sound is the poem's clearest marker of danger and its clearest marker of relief. The sirens "get louder," the wind is "roaring," and then comes the long thirteenth line: "we no longer heard the roaring winds and no longer was our basement roof caving in." The repeated "no longer" turns the earlier "I heard" and "I could hear" inside out. Safety here is a silence, and the speaker reads it as "a sign that it was now over." That short line after the long one works like an exhale.
The last line then breaks the pattern of sensory reporting. The speaker stops describing what they saw or heard and says what they thought, and the tense shifts from past to present: "all I could think about is." The feeling has outlasted the storm. The line also has no full stop, so the poem ends open, as if the thought were still going. The "you" is never named, which lets the line hold whatever relationship a reader brings to it.
The poem is significant because it keeps a disaster at human scale. It doesn't explain how tornadoes form or count the damage. It uses simple, direct language and puts the emotional turn in the final line, where it hits hardest. It reads as first-hand testimony, though the text alone can't confirm that. Its message is that, in the moment after danger, people don't think about the storm itself. They think about who was with them.