Beyond Despondency Poem by Sonny Rainshine

Those moments just before a late summer storm
when wind gusts test the mettle of the branches
of the trees and yanks on the mellowing leaves
as if to loosen them for autumn’s sweeping-out,
it seems as if my thoughts are stirred and tested also.

And when the meadow is rippled by the bluster,
and the grass becomes the sea, turquoise ocean,
rising and falling like my breath and like the storm’s
respirations and exhalations, I sense the pressure
of the air around me, and the solidity of being.

And then it’s all over.
The tempest is spent, my response
to the drama is modulated and I go back to my books
or my housework (my sweepings-out won’t wait ‘til fall) .
It seems that 20th and 21st century literature
cannot get beyond the upheaval, the rage,
the disruption of the storm.
Two world wars and their aftermath,
and the despair remains in the rubble
and the possibility that all is meaningless
and random. I need stories, poems,
plays, that look past the storm,
past the despondency—
We know the darkness is there;
why repeat it over and over and over?
Lead us to light.