In a Time of Drought

In a time of drought the world loses its voice
And the usual clamor of living things slows almost to complete silence.
The creatures of the weeds and the woods lose the will
To exercise their mandibles and their extremities.

In a time of drought,
A real one,
By its seventh week or more,
The Sun has stolen every drop from the top layer of the soil
And has turned that soil into a impenetrable brightness that dazzles the eyes
And gives every footstep the same devouring crunchiness
As ancient snow.
A crunchiness that sinks the spirits and cultivates fear.

In a time of drought,
An extreme one,
In other climes people deal with excessive rain and fears of floods, and speak of those in ways
That make one wish that drought and too much rain could be redistributed
So as to be equalized as needed, though there is about as much chance of humans achieving that feat
As there is to redistribute the wealth.

It is not good to dream in times of drought,
In deep ones, because the dreams grow even more bizarrre than usual,
And people you've known who could now be either disappeared or dead
Cannot be asked the name of such and such, and be given a name
That sounds exactly right, yet when the dreamer cannot hold that name in his mind
And must ask the person again, is  this time told that he or she has also forgotten.
It is important to know
That  in times of drought, serious ones,
The memory of those dreamed of is only your memory and no one else's.


The above post is an experiment in writing a poem on a weblog.   It was composed in my mind, carried around for a couple of hours, and then dashed off at the computer, without any serious changes.   If it is indeed a poem, it would be the first one I've written in many years.   And who's to know whether it is a poem or not?. That's one of the hidden beauties of poetry.  But in the meantime, somebody send so rain!