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“Fall Rain” by Robert Bly 🇺🇸 (23 Dec 192621 Nov 2021)
In the rain the sodden leaffoor shudders faintly as if ruffling its feathers; it is the time when bark hangs from old birch and poplar trees, like rags, and the moss gains new foothold on the sodden cedar trunk leaning out over the water. The husband, in the damp bed covered with blankets, dreams of aunts he has never heard of, dead grandfathers still alive, and strange earthquakes as they walk the street. Now on the roof the delicate rain whispers of wet sails falling over abandoned junks in ancient harbors of China, and of young women wandering in the rain to die, and it whispers of drowned bodies floating on the stairs of the lake floor, ascending to the eternal balconies of death, and of the souls of those of the furst World War beneath the tangled metal, the buckles and the ghosts of leather, ghosts of wooden wagon wheels, of shell casings and bandages. Now the sound of geese is heard.