The Weather's Sorrows Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Raindrops rush to kiss their shadows;
On the street, the ineffective weaponry of little tears,
They become something else,
The stanzas to the prism’s blush,
And the joy invades the puddles where the
Shadows are smothered, and the raindrops splatter
And lose themselves in the crowds of effluvious reflections;
The muddy eddies of the nameless insignificance
No one drowns in.
Then the street is so busy it cannot stop to save
The wavering shadows of indecisive weather,
Though the form of the world remains unchanged,
With neither heat nor frost added, though
The energy changes sides many times in the little wars,
And it is true that for awhile everything lives,
And then for a very long while everything dies,
Then souls are annexed to their secret rooms,
And the bones of kings and serfs grin together
Under the mealy bogs.

Though imagine the mysterious joy I can find in
The weather’s sorrows, the cold tips of liquid arrows
Send the sparrows to their nettled roosts;
And house cats meowing to their masters’ stoops,
But if I keep enough time outside by the weighing window,
I will see her pass by and recognize what she is;
For a moment, a dropp of rain walking in the shallow sky,
Before she is forever changed inside the over spilling
Buckets of her noisy metropolis;

Coming back to her in a dream,
She continues falling without reason except
That is what she is, a weathered tear dropp in the shallow sky,
An inexpensive joy I must recognize before I too
Am constantly changed.