Thunderbird is part of my ongoing exploration of light, resilience, and truth in the natural world. I’m drawn to the way the sky mirrors our inner weather—the turbulence, the breaks, the moments when radiance returns.
In this photograph, I captured a moment when the sky seemed to split open with like a living pulse, a thundercloud unfurling its dark wings while a single gull moved through the gold above the storm’s raw shoulder. I named it Thunderbird—not for its power alone, but for the grace within it. There’s something sacred in that balance: shadow and shine, storm and stillness, all part of one truth. To live authentically is to meet life this way—unmasked, unguarded, luminous where you’ve been broken. Watching that bird drift through the torn light, I felt what it means to be real: to rise anyway, carrying everything that made you, and still find beauty in your flight.
Location: Falmouth, Menauhant Beach
Poem: Thunderbird by Ocean Eversley©2025
A thundercloud unfurls its shadowed wings
over the sea’s restless blue—
gold fractures at the edges,
silver threads shimmer across the water below.
A lone gull rides the wind’s high seam,
gliding the gold above the storm’s raw shoulder,
not apart from struggle, but beyond it—
a bright shape moving through what must be crossed.
Beneath, the ocean gathers all it’s given:
grief and radiance, salt and resolve,
tumbling confession into every wave,
deep and indivisible as being real.
Light pulses from the torn horizon—
it does not banish shadow, but joins it,
steady as the heartbeat of what endures:
flight, not for calm, but for truth.
Clouds part, letting sky breathe through;
storms ravel, and the truth finds its way.
The gull knows this.
So do I.