Forecast

dana NEIBERT

“Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.”

Words fall from the sky
into my just awake mind,
onto the consciousness
of my new day’s dawn.

I lean back my head and
and drink that rain
like magical champagne.

Some days they sprinkle.
Some days they pour.
Some days storms rage
and tear like hurricanes
across my blank page.

It is not something
I can command or control.

It is how poems begin.

It is imagination’s source,
the climate of creativity,
the sense in the nonsense,
possibility in impossibility.

It slakes my thirst
for more than mundane,
makes life matter
beyond money and pain.

My task: turn what falls
from words into patterns,
write the drops down,
try to make them mean,

and then

wake up every day
and do it all again,
wait for that weather,
pray for that rain.