-ALL POEMS ARE PROTECTED BY ONE OR MORE COPYRIGHTS-
Yes there are moments when I wonder
“Why are we doing this?”
Like when it’s raining
- and I don’t mean your average soft sweet shower -
but more like it’s being poured out of an endless bucket
and it’s cold
and it’s been that way all day
and that New Hampshire highway has no shoulder
and everything is leaking from the rain coming down
and the traffic splashing up
and your boots are more like wading pools
and your body is worn out from lugging them along.
And you curse every driver who comes a little too close,
which means you’re cursing everyone who splashes you by.
Yes there are moments when I want to cry,
“Why are we doing this?”
“Hi, do you remember me?”
She was sort-of-pretty. Her name was Mary.
She wrote for a local paper. We met her yesterday.
It was dry way back then. And the rain was not so heavy
just now.
“Can I talk to you guys for a moment?
“It’s kind-of-important.”
It was a place where we could get off the road.
So we did and all of us in our rain gear
got closer together so we could hear
through the rain and the traffic
on the road.
“Do you remember me telling you about my brother?”
I did. She had said he was dead. And as a poet
she hadn’t been able to write in the months
since it happened.
“But what I didn’t tell you was that he dreamed of doing
“something like you’re doing. He wanted to see the world slowly,
“softly, sweetly, close up and personal. But he didn’t get to do that.”
The showers intensified as she pulled her hand
from under her slicker. As she extended her
clinched fist toward us she said,
“If you tell me no I will understand.”
Right then she opened her fist to reveal
a silver locket in her palm as she explained,
“In this locket are some of my brother’s ashes.
“Would you take them with you so he can live his dream?”
Yes there have been times when I have cried in the rain.
But never have I cried so sweetly as I did right then.
Yes there are times when I wonder,
“Why are we doing this?”
But not there.
Not then,
in that rain.
Right there,
right then,
I knew why.
{bud}