Playing Fair and Being Kind

SWEET RAIN

Hot and dry days have lingered.
Smiling merchants and other makers of fun
Extol the importance of days like these,
‘Bring us the pretty days and the people,
With bulging pockets of silver’,
They sing this song of love, of desire, of mindless want
‘So that the year will be good and fruitful with happiness
For all (of us right here not you)’.

(Dramatic music…drums in the back of the auditorium,
Large drums with musicians holding long sticks with big, heavy heads,
Falling upon the drum skins with solemn intensity. Boom, boom, boom, etc.)

Molecules brush past one another and ions form,
Then a flash and a roll of thunder, clouds heat up with kinetic energy,
Tons of water lumbering in from the West.
(Drumming fades…the music softens, an oboe or clarinet opens its sweet throat to usher
In the beautiful Rachmaninoff rhapsody on a theme of Paganini, 18th variation.)

See the purple flowers clinging to the vines of soft, tired leaves,
The veins are empty and no moisture exists to plump the cells and it is past
Time to feed the systems that feed all of us. RAIN!!! ENOUGH!!!
WE WANT RAIN, shout the grasses and tubers and other citizens of the earth,
GIVE US WHAT WE NEED!!! No doubt about it, if one is listening, that is,
The air coming in from the West continues to roll and push past the hills,
Past the warm, slowly moving rivers that wander down upon low land between hills,
Darkening the skies above farms and houses that are empty of people who are
Now waiting to take a ride on a two-masted schooner
Not too different from the trireme of the Greeks who were sailors
Long before the skippers of the tourist boats that ply between the mainland
And Monhegan (or such).
No matter, the rains are coming and the ground and branches anticipate a grand
Festival of wet, drips of ecstasy that will pass through the membranes of roots
Into the branches under ground and up the cellular structures in stems, veins, leaves
To the petals of luscious flowers that bloom in the morning to thrill the heart of the most
Dry, desiccated soul with dry, desiccated heart.

(Cue the first notes of Miles’ “Kind of Blue”)

Smell the water in all forms and dimensions, molecules to Horseshoe Falls,
See the leaves and blossoms stiffen with swollen cells of sweet water,
Feel the CO2 pulled into the leaf for sugar production,
Exhale, as does the plant, nearly all of the water it absorbs,
Sing the song of water, dust, roots in the soil, soaking in H2O,
Let the moisture fill your throat, your nasal passages, the tiny hairs in the ear,
Lie on your back in the rivulets that pass by you,
Put your feet in the mud,
Sit with your buttocks under water in puddles,
Enjoy what the earth fully needs more of,
Be a fat, rotund, immobile, fleshy cactus on the ground in the rain with no place to go,
Soak up four hundred times your weight in water molecules and then smile.
Sing along with the piano, the saxophone, the trumpet, with all of the sextets.
Let the tourists miss a ride for a change.
G. M. Goodwin
August 7, 2019