It has been raining

Since yesterday

The streets

And creeks

Are deep

With water,

Guzzling,

Gurgling,

Mud-yellow red,

Dirty,

The thirsty

Earth

Is frowning,

Drowning

In the downpour.

I keep looking

In the dark

For meaning,

I stay up nights

Listening to the rain,

Hoping to find

Something

That answers my wond’ring

And sates my

Weary soul.

Twenty years ago today, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down, reuniting overjoyed throngs in democratic western Europe with their families and friends in the commuist east after 30 years of division.

This symbolic end to the east-west blockade, which came just two years after then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan famously admonished Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” signaled the beginning of the end of European communism.

Less than a year later, on October 30, 1990, Germany was officially reunified.  By Christmas 1992, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.

If I were never cool enough

Young enough

Smart enough

Slick enough

Smooth enough

Then forgive my disdain

Dissatisfaction

Disregard

Disappointment

And dismay

In having to be

Only the person I could manage to be

And look back at he

And all that was meant to be

Yet choose to see

The goodness that comes forth from me.

There is nothing quite as primal

As being barefoot in the park

As the primordial rocks warm on your soles,

The water dripping down your ankles,

The sound of the stream splattering regularly

Down the cliff face.

One has to laugh

Either that, or cry

I choose to laugh.

A favorite poem of mine, by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935):

Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
    We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
    Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
    And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
    “Good morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich — yes, richer than a king,
    And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
    To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
    And went without the meat, and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
    Went home and put a bullet through his head.

“Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson from The Second Book of Modern Verse, Jessie B. Rittenhouse, ed.  ©Houghton Mifflin, 1920.

Simplicity

I do not think

Can come

Unless you are willing

To accept its complexities.

 Excerpt of a poem by Carl Sandburg:

Do you know how the dream looms?  how if summer

       Misses one of  us  the  two of us miss summer—

So I shall look for you…

In the listening  tops  of  the  hickories,  in  the  wind

       Motions of the hickory shingle leaves, in the imi-

       tations of the slow sea water on the shingle silver

       in the wind—

                  I shall look for you.

“Silver Wind” by Carl Sandburg from Smoke and Steel.  ©Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, Inc., 1920.  This excerpt as seen on a portrait of Sandburg in Hendersonville, NC, with lines arranged here as originally published.  MBH 

I like summer.  It makes me happy.  It makes me feel alive and optimistic for the future.  I don’t get sad in the summer.  I don’t get lonely.  I am not, usually, depressed by the warm air, the gorgeous breezes, the sun-dappled water, or the grand mountains.  Summer here is an amalgam of childhood’s memories and later-life remembrances.  I am all at once ten and then thirty-something.  My soul lives here; it haunts the side streets and corner benches of small towns along the line.  It grows old at the soda fountain.  It rests by the stream.  I need not grandeur nor renown; I have the summer.