The Tornado.

God let me fall from His hand     One day at His forge when the elemental world     Was shaping. I am but a breath from His great bellows,     But here among the workshops of mankind     I am a fateful scourge.     I tear red strips from the proud cities of men;     I name my passage the Highway of Instant Death;     I splinter world-old forests with my laugh,     And whirl the ancient snows of Hecla sheer into Orion's eyes.     I dance on the deep under the big Indian stars,     And wrap the water spout about my sinuous hips     As a dancer winds her girdle. The ocean's horrid crew,     The octopus, the serpent, and the shark, with the heart of a coward,     Plunge downward when they hear my feet above on the sea-floor,     And hide in their slimy coverts. Brave men pray upon the straining decks     Till comes my mood to end them, and I strew the racing foam with wreckage.     I am a breath from God's forge. I remember His awful workshop,     How the hot globes spun off into infinite darkness, as system by system,     The universe was wrought; and then I remember the birth of the sun,     How God cried: "Let there be light!" and, blinding, bewildering, exulting,     The great orb flamed from His furnace, and only the Creator stood upright.     In that hour I fell from His hand.     I am a breath from God's forge,     And, being a part of creation, I shall also be a part of the end.     He has told me that there shall come a day     When the Seventh Angel shall open his last vial of wrath in the mid-air,     And in that day I shall dance with the thunder, the lightning, and the earthquake,     And, dancing, hear His voice cry out from Heaven's temple: "It is done!"