ALL NIGHT THE RAIN
All night the rain wanted
to get inside my house--
throwing itself against walls
and windows, desperate
for a crack or gap.
It said it was tired of the lonely sky,
envied the cat asleep at my feet.
It doesn't like being an outsider.
There's nothing to look forward to.
Just the old story of falling,
soaking in and running off
to join the anonymous ocean.
Yes, rising from that vast
watery plain can be a thrill, lifting,
weightless, into the high rare air.
But rising only to fall again?
Rain wonders what the point is.
Would it still be restless, sad, if
it understood how intimately we know it?
How we carry rain inside our bodies?
To Barbara Gibson - a remarkable womanAll night the rain wanted
to get inside my house--
throwing itself against walls
and windows, desperate
for a crack or gap.
It said it was tired of the lonely sky,
envied the cat asleep at my feet.
It doesn't like being an outsider.
There's nothing to look forward to.
Just the old story of falling,
soaking in and running off
to join the anonymous ocean.
Yes, rising from that vast
watery plain can be a thrill, lifting,
weightless, into the high rare air.
But rising only to fall again?
Rain wonders what the point is.
Would it still be restless, sad, if
it understood how intimately we know it?
How we carry rain inside our bodies?
Her book: On the Bridge, New Olympia Poems
Oh, I like this so very much! The last stanza is particularly wonderful.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing it with us.
oh, thank you for pulling that one off the pages. the rain and i have been having many conversations lately. this one hits home.
ReplyDeletexoxo
btw--i see you reordered your words re:book/poem/titles. nicely done :-)
HI MAUREEN,
ReplyDeleteThanks for checking in at the MindSieve today.
Lucy, I think Barbara's little book of poetry is wonderful. Another poem I particularly like is the one entitled "Grief."
And the editing I did this morning...I had edited last night before I set it up to print and had corrected that string of misleading thought poem versus book title. Regrettably, I suppose I didn't save at the appropriate time and the "old" version showed up! Computers do have minds of their own and often they depend on our minds to work - that's a mistake:)
xoxoxo