Rain Empowers

I watched a butterfly today,
her wings flipped and fluttered
to dry the dampened dew from
clogging what were her means
of escape, her wings of chance,
her future, laid bare and brutalized.

I love sudden downpours the best,
blue skies turned gray in surprise
with little time to hide before droplets
of heaven’s tears consume the earth,
seeping into cracks and crevices;
to fill the drying land with tides of change.

Floods consume the all-too-thirsty,
thrust themselves into burning fields
and soon abandoned houses; developments
caught in mud slide paths, with nothing
left but filth and grime, only to chase
the pure who’ve left alive.

The rain seems to follow tragedy,
spit upon the homeless and forgotten
with cackles and laughs to illuminate
the sky in thunder, rumbling reminders
of our vulnerability, easily ruined
in lakes too deep and waves too strong.

For rain is seen as horror, drowning
children lost beneath the puddles in
graveyards built too level and paved
too narrow with shallow graves to
try and hide the bodies, longing
for the sunshine just as we do.

I live beneath the drops that fall from
clouds, too heavy to float another inch;
I live like grass and plants and weeds,
turned brown from drought and envy
underwater plants; I live for puddled pools,
riddled with ringlet raindrops waves,

for just as the earth, I crack without the rain.

The rain empowers me in the same ways that sad songs and black and white movies and dark colors do. The gloomy aspects of those things make everything else seem just that much brighter.