DEATH IS A MIRROR LEAKING LIGHTNING
Death is a mirror
leaking lightning.
Time alters to fit
around the fact.
The sunlight empties itself
of warmth
merely picks out the world
as if the effort hurt.
Time unpicks
stitch by stitch
Life’s rich embroidery.
A constellation comes
to comfort me.
It hovers awkwardly
above my pain
unable to comprehend
its tiny immensity.
I have become the rabbit
staring at me from a trap
watching the world
erase itself
second by second.
Two crows
perch upon your tombstone
gossiping about how
the world comes and goes.
I throw angry words
at them.
They caw off into
an empty sky.
A marble angel & I
standing sentinel.
The marble angel
trying not to cry.
What lightning is, and what it can do. People covered all the mirrors in their house because they can “catch and reflect” lightning…mirrors leak lightning. It was thought that lightning can behave like light and be reflected. Lightning of course is not light, but a raw, electrical charge.
When large turbulent clouds form, they build up a powerful electric charge through a mechanism that’s only partly understood, although the general principle is the same as when you make static electricity by rubbing a balloon with wool. As the charge builds, it creates an electrical field between the cloud and the ground. As that field gets stronger, the air begins to ionise until there are enough ions to provide a path for the electricity to discharge. Once current begins flowing down this path, the air in that path gets hotter and ionises even more, which lets more current flow to make the air even hotter and more ionised. Within microseconds, the amount of energy passing through that path heats the air so much that it begins glowing – not red hot, or even white hot, but ultraviolet hot. For the brief moment that the current is flowing, what we have is a lightning bolt which is basically air heated so much that it acts like a wire in an electric circuit. Once all that energy has been dumped to Earth, there’s nothing to sustain the electric field, the current stops flowing, and the lightning bolt disapears. Meanwhile, all that superheated air has expanded violently, in a loud explosion which we hear as thunder. Fun fact: This happens somewhere on Earth many times every single second!
So we’ve established that lightning is an extremely intense electrical discharge flowing along a temporary path of ionised air. Suddenly the original question, about lightning being reflected by mirrors, doesn’t even make sense. Although a mirror could possibly conduct electricity (they’re made by plating the back of a piece of glass with silver or aluminium, which are both highly conductive), it certainly couldn’t reflect it. If a bolt of lightning were to strike a mirror, it would simply blast through the mirror.
Now lightning is very bright, emitting a lot of light. Mirrors can reflect this light, if it happens to shine on the mirror, with ease. But the actual bolt itself won’t deflect from its original path towards the mirror simply because the light is being reflected.
That said, lightning can do some pretty weird things. There are records of lightning bolts striking and killing a man inside a movie theatre while leaving the building intact and his fellow patrons unharmed. Lightning bolts have been known to strike telephone wires and **** people using the phone kilometers away. The faint electrical fields around radio transmitters (like the ones we all carry around in our cellphones) have occasionally been known to attract lightning. So it certainly is possible for lightning to enter your home and strike your mirrors, if you’re spectacularly unlucky. But it could just as likely avoid them. Covering them up makes no sense, and certainly won’t change that particular roll of the dice.