'Alongside the ancient Siberian apple. I offer what I am to the alongside of it.' Photo: Shelley Pauls / Unsplash
For America in a time of a drought
A poem by Dana Littlepage Smith
The rain in the old cemetery is simple.
It falls on yarrow, clover, ragwort
dispensing pearls into the grain of day,
into the Yorick skull-clot of Devon clay.
The tissue of the warm-wooded dead
is wormed with the first drop of its showers,
runs into the finger-hold of tiny oaks, rooting
in dust, splattered by green rain-come-down-rain.
The cow parsley dances in the douse of it,
the wild grain may drop its seed one dusk
because of it. The sparrow sings into the blather of it,
the blackbird spreads its dust-rich wings through it.
The violet-gold folds of time wrinkle and flow through it
as magpie and raven leap through the release of it.
Morning winkles out the slavered surprise of it,
afternoon proves the lacework chemistry of it.
The cloud-thick fall of it arrives intentionless:
its givenness drenches the just and the unjust.
It is permeable, soft even in deluge, unlike a rubber bullet.
Its hydrogen and oxygen make no one choke or bleed.
I pray to be schooled in it, to be baptised in rain
as I strip in the June cold to wait for it, alongside the ancient
Siberian apple. I offer what I am to the alongside of it,
I commit to stand in its fallen fallenness. I will wait
in the meeting house of damson, birch and poplar with it.
I will listen to the fret of it. Be washed into the dissolution of it,
blessed by the birthing wet of it. I shall kneel in the dream-fog of it.
I shall fold my ache into the lack of it, into the weep and tear-burst kiss of it.
