A Last Rain Song

by Temple Cone

Lightning doesn’t send rain, but beguiles
Its fall, lightning the Lucifer to those angels

In anguish at Shiloh or the Somme, bodies torn,
The dying left afield overnight. A storm

Anointed them, easing parched throats.
Else it meant to drown the world and lost heart.

“That’s nothing,” says the editor. “Every time it rains,
I get batches of rain poems, some in praise, some complaints,

And they always arrive on days of the clearest blue.”
Into chinks in walls, into eyes of the dead, sluices

Rain, and your heart, which never has felt
The water’s touch, longs to welcome those devils

When they knock at your bones like a door,
Begging you, at last, to admit their wild uproar.

Visit Temple Cone’s webpage at http://www.templecone.com.