This was to be a psalm about deliverance,

How reprieve can be a kind of resurrection.

Month after month of drought, and now

Premonition if not yet revelation of rain,

Wind rising along the ridge-line of sere

And serried pines, needles swirling sparks

As the sun flares and embers in the ashen

Sky, banked by clouds soot-black and hard

As stones, soft thunder the sound they make

Tumbling down the lowering light, rising dust.

Somewhere there is rain, someone making

A poem of it, knowing he has words for only

A part of it, the few moments of its passage

That he can set down and then must let go,

Giving it to the wind and the water, Li Po

Setting his poems adrift on the Yellow River.

Here, stones and stream are now a still pool,

Clouds climbing the hill and falling farther

On toward the next, silence, rain and poem  

Slipping away beyond my reach and speech.

"Seal up those things which the seven thunders

Uttered, and write them not."