How It Came to Be
A Poem Born on a Noon Drive Home
I want to tell you about a man I know.
His name is David Stillings. He runs Stormy Weather Gallery on Highway 17/92 in Casselberry, Florida, and on any given day you might walk in and find him reading you one of his poems before you've even told him why you came. If you need something framed, he'll do the job for less than it's worth and he'll do it well. That's just who he is.
David has never had it easy. He married young and spent decades chasing lightning storms across the country — sometimes dropping everything the moment the sky turned right. A steady job was never really in the cards. But a steady passion? That he has always had.
It started in 1974 when he saved up enough to buy his first camera — a Minolta SRT 101. Over fifty years, through a succession of Minoltas he still keeps to this day, David became one of the most recognized lightning photographers in the world. He became known simply as The Lightning Stalker. His work has been featured on the Discovery Channel, Raging Planet, in People Magazine and Outside Magazine, and in newspapers across the United States and Europe.
This year David is marking his 50th year as a photographer and poet. And America is turning 250. Those two things came together in a poem. Here's how it happened, in David's own words:
"Every day at noon on my way home for lunch I listen to AM radio 580 WDBO. They play a patriotic song — sometimes the National Anthem — just because. One day I was listening and after it was over, it hit me. The National Anthem is basically two questions. 'Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light?' and 'Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?' That's two questions. And that's what it's all about.
So at the beginning of 2026 I sat down and wanted to write a poem to celebrate our 250th. I had written one for our Bicentennial in 1976 titled 'The Courage of Man.' I started writing and wasn't real happy with the first draft. So I tried to get everything else out of my mind, turned the radio off, and just really thought about what I wanted to say. It took me six months to get it where I wanted it.
I have thought about changing a word here or there but as I look at it now on this print, I really like it. What a neat thing."
— David O. Stillings
When I read "Two Questions" I thought immediately: this belongs on a wall. Not just because it's a good poem — though it is — but because it asks something of us. It asks whether we still see the flag. Whether it's still there. And David, in his own plain-spoken way, answers back: Hell yes it is.
— Jim Vigue, publisher
