How the hell do I get stanza breaks in this thing?? Geez, I feel behind in the times.

“Here Comes the Rain”

by Adrienne D'Agostino

---

I’ve come here to the place

where standing I reach to the sky,

Limbs akimbo, my upturned face

Golden-brown in the sun’s embrace.

Here I watch as heavy, grey ships

huff and puff their way across

an endless expanse of pale blue,

pari passu,

their bellies full to burst with the

burden they have carried since birth.

With a rumble and groan these mighty

leviathans shift their massive bodies and

hide the sun with their darkening bulk,

straining each against a weight that

pulls them ever-closer to the ground below.

---

For a moment I imagine what would happen

if one of these monstrous beasts,

so horrible but so beautiful

in their untamed savagery,

carried a load too great to resist

and fell to the earth with a crash and a roar,

shattering into a million shards of smoky glass

and scattering its watery burden across the land.

I could myself peer into each tiny drop,

(quivering, silent, it appears

as a world of its own, gathering

the very universe within its depths)

and see perhaps a reflection of myself,

or not myself,

for how could what would seem so small

and yet hold so much

have room enough for insignificant me?

---

A sudden quiet settles over the plain,

like a velvet blanket smothering the eternal motion

of the universe as it waits, poised

in silent anticipation,

in eternally charged excitement,

as one soon to reveal some momentous secret.

I breathe,

holding it in till my lungs burn from the pressure,

even as cool air caresses my face,

a promising whisper of the approaching gale.

As I stand atop this hill,

my face turned toward the purple-grey sky,

a smile curls from my lips,

for here comes the rain.