Going on a Quest

The Sun Wasn’t Supposed to Come Out Today

Not a chance, the magic rectangle said

And I left my sunglasses at home to minimize drag.

It makes a difference, you can feel it.

Well, who knows if anyone’s even sitting behind that desk anymore, fiddling with the models and checking the math?

We stopped funding anything useful.

At least telling the weather wasn’t deemed witchcraft.

My point is:

The sun came out when it was supposed to start raining

Just a peek, just enough to make soft shadows appear

Instead of more gray piddling droplets

And I squinted under my hat 

Questioning my morning logic

Smelling green and pink growing smells 

Wondering why mildly inconvenient things happen to decent-enough people.

If the team of scientists with fancy computer software can’t be sure

About where the clouds will be today,

Can you blame me for holding out hope

That maybe if I gave it some time

You might change your mind too? 

That maybe you were wrong

And we can frolic in the sun after all?

This has been sitting in the notes app for a week or two. I cried twice in the space of a few days for two different reasons, which is unprecedented and calls for Sad Sack Poetry Writing, I guess. The second time was a surprise because I thought I had gotten over the thing it was about and was being really cool and chill. Now I’m actually (maybe) over it, or at least I can act normal about it.

Coincidentally, the meadow of weeds in the cover image was mowed a few days after I took the photo. I get why the housing authority does it, but I still think most of the overgrown jungle grass space looked better than buzzed-down stubbly weeds with a few patches of grass mixed in. And dog shit. The fields of mugwort and clover and burdock really hid a lot of dog shit, which is good if you’re not a moron and don’t walk through it when you can’t see the ground. I’ve gotta stop at some point, but having an image search app on my phone and hitting the random plants on my daily routes and in my scrungy yard with it to find out exactly what kinds of weeds are growing there has really opened a whole new world. I’ll be walking along and think “black locust. Mugwort. Virginia knotweed (NOT the Japanese kind, benign). Boom. I am so in touch with nature.” I recommend it.