After a Month of Rain

After a Month of Rain
by Linda Pastan


Everything I thought I wanted
is right here,
particularly when the sun
is making such a comeback,


and the lilac engorged
with purple has recovered
from its severe pruning,
and you will be back soon


to dispel whatever it is
that overtakes me like leaf blight,
even on a day like this. I can still
hear remnants of the rain


in the swollen stream
behind the house, in the faint
dripping under the eaves,
persistent as memory.

And all the things I didn't think
I wanted, cut like the lilac back
to the root, push up again
from underground. 


"After a Month of Rain" by Linda Pastan, from Traveling Light. © W.W. Norton & Co., 2011.


From the Writer's Almanac

Another View of your Paunch

Self-Portrait as a Bear

by Donald Hall

Here is a fat animal, a bear
that is partly a dodo.
Ridiculous wings hang at his shoulders
as if they were collarbones
while he plods in the bad brickyards
at the edge of the city, smiling
and eating flowers. He eats them
because he loves them
because they are beautiful
because they love him.
It is eating flowers which makes him so fat.
He carries his huge stomach
over the gutters of damp leaves
in the parking lots in October,
but inside that paunch
he knows there are fields of lupine

and meadows of mustard and poppy.
He encloses sunshine.
Winds bend the flowers
in combers across the valley,
birds hang on the stiff wind,
at night there are showers, and the sun
lifts through a haze every morning
of the summer in the stomach.

"Self-Portrait as a Bear" by Donald Hall, from White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1964-2006. © Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.

 clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org