For America in a time of a drought

A poem by Dana Littlepage Smith

'Alongside the ancient Siberian apple. I offer what I am to the alongside of it.' | Photo: Shelley Pauls / Unsplash

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.

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