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The Clearing of Rain
By Jane Tawel
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Rain clears me
The sight and sound and smell of water
Coming like manna from the sky
It moves me to poetry.
It stuns me into true meditation.
It opens me to prayer.
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Here in the desert-land
of my large, busy city,
we have so little rain
It comes in drips and drabbles.
We have so much of everything here.
And yes, so little.
So many stars on the sidewalks,
so few stars in the sky.
So many buildings soaring
so few shelters for the poor.
So much money spent
so little shared.
So much sun and heat and fire,
and oh, my soul! — so little rain.
I think perhaps we cursed ourselves,
here in this land of grabbers,
when we stopped The People
from their rain dances on The Land.
The Sky-Child has cried all His tears
and has no more.
And The Land has gathered Sky’s tears
into Her deepest womb
where, perhaps we gobblers can not devour them
as we have devoured all Nature’s other gifts.
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To strain to hear the tiny drops of rain
reminds me of how hard it is to hear God
with so many plastic gods competing for attention.
The god of AmEx and of Capital One.
The god of the Amazon that rains our money
only on one man as the rainfall in the amazon dries up
to fill my coffee cup.
The great gods masquerading as freedom
concealing the real terror behind their force;
hiding the fact, that they are storm clouds of desire
gathering, ever and ever gathering,
but never coming down among us,
never healing the gardens we plant,
never baptizing us
to give us Life.
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Create in me, a new heart, O God,
One that makes a desert of my desires,
compared to my thirst to find
a Kingdom of Quenching others’ thirst,
on Earth,
as it is in the Heavens.
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To smell the water
sent from heaven
knowing what it is up against
as it bravely tries to turn to green
our dead desert yards
reminds me even when Hope
is a faint scent of bare possibility,
we must remember —
this land has died before
and it will die again.
And then — perhaps only then —
The rains will return.
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May the children, once more,
Dance in puddles left by many rains.
And in this arid, barren fullness,
may we, who have wrinkled
our skins with our endless searches,
our flying to find the sun;
we who have deadened our hides
as we have deadened our hearts;
we who have wasted the water
as we have wasted our precious hours —
may we be cleansed in floods of Love,
Love for our Mother Earth and Father Sky,
Love for our children and our enemies alike.
Baptized with the fire of Our Holy Spirits,
may we dance rain dances once more,
and running out into the deluge,
may we wait with hope for the rain,
with mouths empty and open.
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© Jane Tawel, 2025
Jane Tawel 