OF WEATHER & WAR & LOVE
You know the day that Mother Nature runs
Out of her worst extremes in everything -
Cold temperatures when people are talking
About how damn cold it is, and those warm,
Those tropical days you couldn't take off
Anything more and still walk around in
Public? Well, then, we won't have much to talk
About. You want to take what you get, sure,
But not without chewing it with coffee.
Don't you like to lift it and sniff it and
Stretch and bend it and moan some like a cow
About it? The breeze doesn't cool like it
Used to? It doesn't snow like when Grandpa
Had teeth? Maybe we can take some solace
In the fact that North Dakota has it
Worse, that it's hotter than blazes some place
In Kansas? If you don't have the weather,
What have you got? Who's having babies and
Who's not? Who sneaks around behind his wife's
Back, who's putting his thumb on the scale with
Whose meat? If we don't have the weather to
Talk about, we haven't got squawk. Tragedy
Fills the void: buses run right off the sides
Of mountains, children get kidnapped and don't
Get found, bad things keep happening to good
People and politicians go right on
Making laws like saying so makes it so.
Someone somewhere will do something and some
Republican president will have to
Start a war. See, bad weather is always
Better than its best alternative and
There's not much you can do anyway. So,
Folks, pray for high winds and fierce drought, for snow
That covers the tops of telephone poles,
For windchill and cyclone, for Arctic high
Pressure and more lightning, for that swarmy
Late night heat that makes the love making great.
Originally published at Poets Against the War
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