Chinese Title?

Billy Collins, in a poem of his entitled "Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles," uses and admires long titles. This next poem has a long title, not because I really want it to have a long title, but because I wasn't sure what to call it, but I knew that it needed a title to help propel the poem. I wrote this today after talking with a friend about the storm we had over this past weekend (which was not so fun to be in, but gorgeous afterwards). Anyway, without further ado, the poem:

After a Speech, I Go Outside to a Freak Storm and Wonder About the Future

Then the hail barrage stops.

Then I hear its heckling applause follow

the curtain of heavy rain to a distant stage,

behind me or before me I cannot tell,

but at every turn the streets are silent

and littered with shadows.

Where to go from here? To the west,

the sun, like an eye pried open,

peers out from a deep cave of clouds

and spills its startled light over treetops,

while I walk below this strange burning

of glowing green leaves and flitting birds.

Eastward, a rainbow stretches this shaft

of dusk into an arrow, poised to pierce

the distance. And beyond, old thunder

and coming storms clash in the gray

while lightening cracks the thunderhead

wall that encircles my every horizon.