A Prayer for Rain

Let it come down: these thicknesses of air have long enough walled love away from love; stillness has hardened until words despair of their high leaps and kisses shut themselves back into wishing. Crippled lovers lie against a weather which holds out on them, waiting, awaiting some shrill sign, some cry, some screaming cat that smells a sacrifice and spells them thunder. Start the mumbling lips, syllable by monotonous syllable, that wash away the sullen griefs of love and drown out knowledge of an ancient war— o, ill-willed dark, give with the sound of rain, let love be brought to ignorance again. Originally appeared in the March 1964 issue of Poetry magazine.