The Rain Weighs In
Even the rain seems given to extremes—
parched earth, drenched earth, the dusty and the drowned.
So little moderation in all things.
What changes in a day is not this dream
or that, but how our dearest fears resound.
Even the rain is savvy to extremes,
yet modest gifts arrive. Take this morning’s
early shower, a limpid sifting-down
missive for moderation in all things,
arriving as it did midway between
midpoints—equinox and solstice—it found
our speech, like rain, seems given to extremes,
and feeds a flow of vilifying memes
as every explanation seeks its ground.
To favor moderation in all things
seeds paradox. The ends destroy the means.
Assay the easy fix, the judge, the clown.
No simple rain can mollify extremes
when modern nations fall for little kings.
Lisa Rosenberg is the author of A Different Physics, winner of the 2024 American Legacy Book Award for Poetry. A former space program engineer trained as a physicist, her work has been recognized by a Djerassi Leonardo Residency, Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and MOSAIC America Fellowship. In 2017-2018 she served as a regional Poet Laureate in California. Her poems and multidisciplinary essays appear in venues such as Plume, The Threepenny Review, POETRY, The Common, and anthologies.
Read Lisa Rosenberg’s review of Susan Cohen’s Democracy of Fire: Poems, also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Steve Art, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Lisa Rosenberg by Thinh Le
