Making Rainbows Poem by Sarah Mkhonza

Holding love in my hands, this water,
these droplets needed by each plant,
spread into the air, my own fountain.
I fern out a life giving half a sphere
all my own. For it is the angles at which
I hold the hose and pour out into the air,
that come together in a row long and endless
to give expression to colors that call
into being this spherical stretch of color
all my own. It makes me laugh for I have
come to make a covenant with life that
I am a goddess that can make her own rainbows.

Strewn from a source called my own hose,
held in my a hand named rainbow maker
I sprinkle droplets that make my reign in
this world tell for a short while who and what
I am made of.

The grass goes on telling that it lays under
the sprinkle of a joyful telling that says whenever
I touch, whatever, wherever, it changes into
this lovely rainbow in the flow of things that
know how the kiss of this ecstasy that I bring
is a kiss of stubborn love. This love grows rainbows
that mock the birds that chatter and claim a beauty
all their own for they can fly but the rainbow does not
need wings just as it does not need a beak to squeak
and tell the world that there is beauty in song, silence and in
a breath that is made by no beak with nostrils that a perched
on it.

My rainbow stands there smiling silently as if asking me if I
see the love, endless and stretching across the sky waiting
for me to reach out and touch it and own it forever in my memory.
It tells me, 'I have given you this mark of love, hate at your own risk
for you have spoken once and told the thunderstorm not to blast
furiously and disrupt and fill with the fire of war the same sky on
which we can lay down and sleep and not wake up to the sound of
guns for they can be silent once and for all, never to blast again.
The day will come when we can all make our own rainbows and
watch them rise at an angle all ours and see the beginning stretch
out in words that make rainbows with droplets all our own.
That day the NRA will have a runny nose and sniff into the rainbows.





Ra