—Summer, and the Missouri floods after more than a week of rain and storm (2021)
Earth blisters into a break towards a view of the bench—
a stutter of grass, a scar of leaf:the great Missouri’s flood water,
stagnant pools over bottom-land and farms,
muddy ponds on the Katy Trailgone.
A strong-arm of light,
blotted sheets of humidity,
water slipping into cracks varnishing hard scrabble—
no rain for days, no rain for weeks,
the river losing itself in potholes along its bank,
diminishes.
Have you ever stood
stock-still
on a hill waiting for a breeze that never comes?
Branches, too, yearn for windfall,
vines and brush brown,
and we go about our work drinking in salt water sweat,
circling the water-wagon at the far end of the field.
| Copyright © 2021 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
What a stab in the sympathetic reader’s heart (but what other readers for poetry are there?), those last two lines that seem to identify the voices, the cries, the longings….
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, after days--weeks really--of rain, we saw the parking lot near the capitol under water and a few other streams swollen with water and then the sun came out and stayed out and within a week, no flood. Now it's so hot I believe I had heat exhaustion on last Friday and am just now recovering. It rained really hard for the first time on Sunday for about fifteen minutes and I went outside to be in it. Wow! Refreshing. But the heat is back.
ReplyDeleteOur weather in Alamance County seems fairly normal, or maybe I just don’t remember anymore what “normal” was….
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