A storm poem that begins in sunshine is already playing a trick on us. Dave Bonta's "Midday storm" opens on goldfinches showing off in flowering oaks and ends with rain that is nearly invisible. In nine short lines it moves from the loudest, brightest thing in the scene to the quietest, and the shift is its real subject. Between those two points the poem suggests that a storm does more than interrupt the world. It lets the world show what it is made of.
The first stanza is deliberately flashy. "Gad about" is a wonderfully restless phrase, a little disapproving, as if the goldfinches were idlers at a party. The g of "Goldfinches" and "gad" and the b sounds in "blossoming" and "brassy" keep the line bouncing from one bright syllable to the next. The simile "brassy as advertising" is the sharpest move in the poem. Brass suggests the metal's colour and also its loudness, and the comparison pulls in the human world of billboards and slogans. Nature, for a moment, looks like a sales pitch. The oaks even wear "crowns," so the stage is set for display, and display is exactly what the poem is about to undo.
The second stanza turns on the weather. "The clouds draw in" is plain, almost hushed, and the next two lines carry the surprise: "Wood thrushes begin / their evening songs at noon." The birds mistake the darkened sky for dusk, or perhaps they simply answer it. Either way, the day has been quietly rearranged. Notice also the small echo between "draw in" and "begin." It isn't a true rhyme, since the poem has none, but it works like a faint chime that makes the stanza feel closed and inward after the open sprawl of the first. The sentences here are short and calm, and the goldfinches' showy yellow has given way to the thrushes' songs, which the poem treats as sincere, as if they were the real thing and the earlier brightness only advertising.
Then comes the final image, and it is the poem's best. Rain arrives as "long feathers," so the weather turns into a bird. This completes a pattern: the goldfinches' feathers are loud, the rain's feathers are not. The dash after "breeze" works as a hinge, a small pause before the metaphor opens out into "a plumage / the exact color of the world." Rain is nearly colourless, and what we see of it is borrowed from its surroundings, the grey-green of leaves and sky and air. So its plumage is a kind of camouflage, the opposite of the goldfinches' flaunting. The word "exact" is delightful here because it asserts precision about something that has no colour of its own. The rain does not stand out. It matches.
The grammar of the last stanza supports this. It is a fragment with no main verb, and after the busy verbs of earlier lines ("gad," "draw," "begin") the poem stops acting and simply holds up an image. The storm has arrived, and the poem lets things be still.
The rhythm throughout is free verse, with short lines that breathe at the end of each phrase. The compression recalls the brevity of haiku, though the poem does not follow any strict count. Its three tercets form a small arc of bright noise, darkening, and calm.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it changes our idea of a storm in so little space. A storm is usually a threat or an inconvenience. Here it is a kind of dressing, in which the sky puts on the same colour as everything beneath it and the world becomes briefly seamless. The goldfinches' brassy glitter looks small beside it, and the effect is quiet and rather moving.