It’s Raining Lullabies
by Cathryn Shea
Some tunes are like the bluebottle fly
hunting luck in poppies on love-struck hills.
Some days are a letter of condemnation
from a lunatic soul, an ancestral being.
Nuns are forever teaching about life
in diagrammed sentences, little hymns.
The urge to set off car alarms is weak with me today.
I want to write on water since I can’t walk on it.
I see a mallard skim the lake’s surface
and I’m poorer for not following it like a duckling.
Just for today. To lull the noisy street,
a hike in rain around the reservoir.
In a storm, the downpour is a chorus
that sings in untold splashes.
Originally published in Absinthe Poetry Journal, Issue 3, 2015
Cathryn Shea is glad she no longer has deadlines for technical writing. Cathryn is the author most recently of It’s Raining Lullabies (dancing girl press, 2017) and the micro chapbook My Heart is a Salt Mirror Like Salar de Uyuni (Rinky Dink Press, 2018). The Secrets Hidden in a Pear Tree is forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2019. Her poetry has been nominated for Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net and can be found in Tar River Poetry, Typehouse, Permafrost, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. Cathryn resides in Fairfax, California. See www.cathrynshea.com and @cathy_shea on Twitter.
