summer rain

It has been raining every day for nearly two weeks. There are the big swollen drops of summer rain. Crashing storms. Tremendous lightning. And hail. Some days it is a mild plunk, plunk of slow and steady drops. Today it is gray and looming again. Maybe some distant thunder or maybe the stillness before a storm passes over.

Before Summer Rain
All at once from the green of the park,
one can't quite say, something is taken away;
one feels it coming closer to the windows
and being silent.

Out of a grove, persistent and strong, sounds a plover,
one thinks of a Saint Jerome:
so intensely rises a solitude and fervor
out of this one voice that the downpour

shall listen. The walls of the great hall
with their paintings retreat from us
as if not allowed to hear what we say.

Reflected in the faded tapestries
is the uncertain light of afternoons
in which one as a child was so afraid.

RAINER MARIA RILKE