“There will come soft rains.” —Sara Teasdale
Sara Teasdale wrote the most beautiful poem ever
and this poem of mine is a strange endeavor.
“There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound.”
I believe life is more bizarre.
Quaint seems the Sara Teasdale star.
Laugh, boomers. We are old and going to die.
We became pagan with almost a precise sigh.
Ray Bradbury, turned to Teasdale’s poetry
and imagined scientific, destructive humanity
wiping itself out in the 21st century.
Only nature is left, blissful and pretty.
Bird songs no longer for human ears.
Sara, who died in 1933,
turned to nature as an isolated treasure
in reaction to World War One’s depopulating horror.
“And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.”
Britain’s post-war, Monty Python, comedy was silly—
it’s how the most thoughtful of us were—
a defense mechanism against organized death,
expanding, expanding.
Facts matter, they say. But which ones?
How could we have done this. “I had hardly taken a breath…”
Funny, winking, homosexuality
stretches itself out on the divan.
Something drains the brain. We found a template.
Fox News is stupid. But poetry doesn’t rally.
Let’s go into town and drown.
The CIA is gay
and looking for Christians.