David J Bauman

It was a good Sunday here, aside from a few cold symptoms, slow and lazy, and ideal for reading and pondering. I hope yours was everything you’d hoped for, and that your Monday will surprise you by being better than you expect.

I had promised you, a review of the new book Local News from Someplace Else, by Marjorie Maddox, and that is finally coming in the next post, along with an explanation about why some things take time to write properly.

But for tonight, as a preview I bring  you a poem that feels perfect for the rainy November midnight that is blowing outside my window. You might have read this piece already this summer if you follow Tweet Speak. And now that the book is out, I hope you treat  yourself to a copy. No collection of poems I’ve ever read confronts the dangerous but beautiful world we raise our families in as deftly as this one.

Meteorology

All day the skies pour, then threaten, then pour again,
making good their promise of gloom,

a comfort really, that what looms eventually crashes down,
rains itself out, or not completely, intent on furthering

its pessimistic forecasts.
Still, there’s relief in reliability,

that what each cloud coughs up
gathers and builds on the eyes’ horizon,

expectations deepening
with each darkening hue.

And so I crave even the low, rumbling
of our longest-forming sorrows,

the truths of all predictions moving past
updraft to downburst to calm.

From her new book Local News from Someplace Else
© 2013, by Marjorie Maddox, WIPF & Stock Publishers

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• An October “Treat” from Poet Marjorie Maddox (dadpoet.wordpress.com)