and every eye shall see it

Having grown up in Kentucky, where there is an abundance of natural beauty, I often feel starved for it here among the empty buildings of our town. But then, sometimes, the sky catches on fire and all the rest becomes shadow and silhouette.

It is the beauty that comes as the last tears of a storm drop away.

I am told there was also a great, thin rainbow that stretched over the whole city. I must've been tucking the kids in when it happened. Either that, or the lenses on my face were too small to take it in at once, here seeing the reds, there the yellows, there the blues and purples. (All these pictures were taken within the same minute.) One girl said someone tucked one corner of artist's paper under the old factory and the other under the bridge by the river, then unfolded it straight up to the sky. Another said some movie maker stood a projector screen on its side from the bridge over Kilgore to a cloud as it ran away and flung it open toward the north. Whether it was a silent movie or a watercolor so large it only seemed to move, I couldn't tell, but color upon color stacked and blended as far as the eye could see.