Weather

(Found here)

There is weather on the day you are born

and weather on the day you die. There is

the year of drought, and the year of floods,

when everything rises and swells,

the year when winter will not stop falling,

and the year when summer lightning

burns the prairie, makes it disappear.

There are the weathervanes, dizzy

on top of farmhouses, hurricanes

curled like cats on a map of sky:

there are cows under the trees outlined

in flies. There is the weather that blows

a stranger into town and the weather

that changes suddenly: an argument,

a sickness, a baby born

too soon. Crops fail and a field becomes

a study in hunger; storm clouds

billow over the sea;

tornadoes appear like the drunk

trunks of elephants. People talking about

weather are people who don’t know what to say

and yet the weather is what happens to all of us:

the blizzard that makes our neighborhoods

strange, the flood that carries away

our plans. We are getting ready for the weather,

or cleaning up after the weather, or enduring

the weather. We are drenched in rain

or sweat: we are looking for an umbrella,

a second mitten; we are gathering

wood to build a fire.

~Faith Shearin