Sarah Barber

The Rain

Knows many ways to fall
and is available all hours, odd jobs,
especially picnics and parades.
Can bend phlox flat or carve,
through force of habit, holes in stone.
Can hurricane, can tornado.
Has been known to press down to fossils
gentle showers that drop on fresh
loose volcanic ash. Experienced
in fogs and mists and exhalations,
with buckets, pitchforks, cats and dogs.
Skilled in lightning, thunder, clouds,
the shades of blue, that wet-earth smell.
Is willing to learn to fall upwards
or, while dripping sweetly soft
onto the just, to catch the unjust
out of doors and drown him.

A Note on the Poem: In his Autobiography, Mark Twain proposed himself “superintendent” of the rain’s affairs, vowing to “rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if [he] caught a sample of the unjust outdoors, [he] would drown him.”

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Sarah Barber is author of Country House, winner of the 2017 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and The Kissing Party, published in 2010 by the National Poetry Review Press. Her poems appear widely and she teaches at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.