Waiting for Rain

Poems about fire, and water, and seasons.

Photo by Mitchell McCleary on Unsplash

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I completely understand why people love summer. Me, I’m ‘way more comfortable when it’s cold and wet outside.

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WILDFIRE MAP                                                                                             2024


Outside under the sun your neighbors stroll past
in brief bright clothes, bare skin well oiled, eyes shaded,
toes flexing free in sandals, voices tanned and happy,
on their way to the pool or the beach or the baseball game,

while indoors you sit stiff-shouldered in front of a screen
and click as you do twice daily in this season
on the link that brings up the wildfire map. Here is an outline
of your state, its length and breadth, and lit across
the dry-grass shades of its topography, tidy orange icons
shaped like cartoon flames – five or six, a month ago,
a matchbox-full, today. Click on any flame and read
a tidy sober list of facts: the name assigned this fire,
how many acres burned, how well contained so far, how many
engines and their crews deployed, notes on evacuations, notes
on weather and terrain.
                                           It is the only way that you can bear
this news that you must follow; headlines, images of charred destruction
scorch your heart and send you into flight, but still you have to know,
so twice a day you walk the map, click through its calm, laconic
list of facts, while in your mind’s eye firestorms shrivel shrubs
and grasslands, turn trees to torches, blacken hillsides and ravines,
while your nerves tense in tandem with creatures trembling now
within the scent of smoke, uprooted in their panic to escape.

Later today you will walk out under the sun among your neighbors,
admire their brief bright clothes, smile as they praise the weather,
then lift your head to sniff the summer air, counting the hours
till your next visit to the map, counting the months and days
till you can dare to hope again for rain.

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RAINFALL IN AUTUMN                                                                                  2023


Morning’s quiet trickles into afternoon;
even the light is still, cloud-filtered. In my room
the window facing west and north is open
to cool cloud-scented air, while at the window
facing west and south, I watch
the soft splash-tap against the glass and wonder
how many drops would be enough to wear away
its dust and grime, the city-sweat of stones.
Here is water doing what it does, being itself
and being-with, reshaping futures while it sings
in Now, tings against fire-escape slats like tympani,
the smallest lightest syncopation, whispering
jazz beats into the quiet cloud-cool day.

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I learned to use the wildfire map a few years ago, when climate change began to add a ferocious intensity to the hot, dry summers that are common in the inland parts of my state. When the city where one of my sisters lives had several neighborhoods destroyed one year, when the town I grew up in was mostly leveled another year, when the thickly-treed wilderness around that town was devastated a year or two after that, I began to identify summer and early autumn with everything the fire map represented.

And I learned to love the rain. It’s a safe love, for me; I’m privileged to live in a micro-climate where the waters don’t often flood or freeze or otherwise endanger human life and shelter. For me, rain is deep refreshment to the taproots of a million growing things, replenishment of the water table, renewal of the ecosystem’s resiliency, and — as needed — a completely natural fire extinguisher and air purifier. It’s a blessing; and, since my state is prone to drought as well as inland heat, it’s a blessing of which I take no single drop for granted.

Still watching the wildfire map, this year. Watching for rainclouds, as well.

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Programming Note: You’ll get a bonus post from me on Friday of this week! It’s in response to a Substack friend who’s a literature teacher, and asked a bunch of us to record a poem that we think of often, maybe know by heart — one that’s become part of us. Not a big post, just a quick note of explanation and audio of me reading someone else’s [heart-stopping] poetry. Please give it a listen if you’re so inclined.