Rain by Reena Ribalow

Leaves are gone or barely hanging on:
warm, it has been so warm.
Tables outdoors, coffee under umbrellas,
desert winds that cheat December,
denying winter.
Newspapers warn of dryness,
the aquifers drawing up the earth’s poisons.
We have reached the bottoms of our wells;
one dare not draw so deep.

There is a price for any warm sweet interlude.
My daughter, dressed in black,
but mourning nothing,
tosses her untamed hair
at fear, at all my hints of doom.
Nothing can convince her:
not kitchen knives waiting to lash out at us
like serpent’s tongues,
not the foretelling of gases (nerve, mustard, poison),
descending like rain from the inscrutable skies.

Perhaps of late I am too easily convinced
to pray for rain.

A familiar chill sets in;
the air is laden with the smell
of earth’s deep moist need
and the scent of endings.

—————

The End

And that’s the End of the Poem

© Poetry Monster, 2021.

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